Not to explain away contradictions, but rather to multiply them

Through the intervention of the Eames Office, IBM began a vast, two-decade-long campaign in the late 1950s to naturalize the computer. This campaign was conducted in multimedia barrage, beginning with exhibitions and films, and concluding with the production of overwhelming spectacles meant to convince the public of two seemingly contradictory ideas, each a contradiction in its own right: first, that the computer was a wholly natural tool, capable only of what human beings could command it to do; and second, that the computer was a force that would radically and even magically change the world.

The Eames Office succeeded beyond IBM’s wildest expectations through the use of two main strategies. First, it aimed not to explain away such contradictions, but rather to multiply them [… to demonstrate] that the computer’s purported natural and magical qualities were complementary. Second, the Eames Office pursued a heuristic design strategy, of placing the exhibition or spectacle viewer in a space that appeared to be free of any formal or overriding regulation, when in fact providing the freedom guaranteed by the invisibility of a rigorously conceived and executed pedagogical program. This two-pronged project culminated in a largely forgotten, decade-long project to build an IBM Museum, which would place visitors inside an invisible computer built at architectural scale with multiple interfaces.

John Harwood, The Interface: IBM and the Transformation of Corporate Design