Bruce, Gordon

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Bruce, Gordon

PERSONAL:

Male.

ADDRESSES:

Home—CT.

CAREER:

Writer, biographer, industrial designer, lecturer, educator, and consultant. Gordon Bruce Design, LLC, owner and operator. Lenovo, Chang- hong, China, design consultant and Honorary Chairman of Design; Samsung, Innovative Design Lab, chairman of product design department; OSIM, Singapore, design consultant. Industrial design consultant with companies such as IBM, Siemens Hearing, Humanscale, Mobil, Westinghouse, Cummins, and Porsche. Visiting professor in the United States and China.

WRITINGS:

Eliot Noyes: A Pioneer of Design and Architecture in the Age of American Modernism, Phaidon Press (London, England), 2007.

SIDELIGHTS:

Gordon Bruce is an author, biographer, industrial designer, and consultant. He is the principal of Gordon Bruce Design, LLC. His career as a designer spans more than thirty-five years and has taken him to countries throughout the world. Bruce lectures internationally at various schools and venues. He has served on judging panels for a number of schools and competitions, and has been an advisor for the International Industrial Design Conference in Aspen, Colorado. His professional career has allowed him to work on products and vehicles of various sizes, from medical equipment to computers to aircraft, noted a biographer on the Usability Professionals' Association Web site.

Bruce is the author of the biography Eliot Noyes: A Pioneer of Design and Architecture in the Age of American Modernism. Noyes was a prominent industrial designer in the middle of the twentieth century who established the basic principles of design followed by some of the era's largest and most successful companies, including IBM, Mobil, Cummins, and Westinghouse, reported the Usability Professionals' Association Web site biographer. Bruce knew Noyes and worked with the innovative designer for almost a decade, from the late 1960s until Noyes's death in 1977. In an interview with Peter Lawrence posted on FastCompany.com, Bruce described Noyes as a "pioneer of American architecture and design who brought credibility to these professions by articulating new design approaches in terms that were easily understood by business people at a time when design decisions were based on vague streamlining styles and planned obsolescence. Moreover, Eliot introduced a new American design attitude by creating solutions based on function and meaningful human interaction, which in turn introduced a new mindset for big business." Among the iconic designs credited to Noyes are the IBM Selectric typewriter, once ubiquitous in American offices, and the Mobil Oil logo, noted Peter Kaufman in the Library Journal. Bruce recounts Noyes's life, education, and career, and provides a positive assessment of the man's influence on American business and the field of industrial design.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Architectural Record, July, 2007, Thomas L. Schumacher, review of Eliot Noyes: A Pioneer of Design and Architecture in the Age of American Modernism, p. 61.

Library Journal, March 1, 2007, Peter Kaufman, review of Eliot Noyes, p. 80.