It’s important to glance back to the past once in a while. Design being a pragmatic sport wasn’t always an easy endeavor. Before the invention of rapid prototypers, 3D modeling applications, and straight up magic machines industrial designers had to get down and dirty with their medium. Follow the breadcrumbs and you’ll see how limitations can make for beautiful details.

This brings me to my all time favorite mid-century modern designers - the Eames. They’re known for their revolutionary use of wire mesh, fiberglass, plastic resin, and bent wood. Now I could go on and on about fiberglass and wire mesh but instead I’ll highlight my favorite. Bent wood is a technique that I had the joy of experimenting with back in college. Wood can be a temperamental material and you’d be right to assume that the process was annoying.

It begins with building a mold evocative of your desired final shape. Thin sheets of bending plywood are individually steamed and set into the mold for a number of hours to train them. Wood glue is paint rolled between each layer in the wooden stack then placed together. Wood sandwich and mold are then put in a large bag. The bag is attached to a vacuum pump and the air sucked out. This compresses everything tightly. Clamps are meticulously set around the bending apparatus to ensure tight adherence to the form. The most nerve racking part comes when you get to sit around for hours with your fingers crossed hoping that the wood doesn’t decide to break at any of the stress points. It rarely goes right the first time and this entire ordeal takes several days. Now take the massive paragraph I just described and try to translate that to mass production. Yeah…

The Eames pioneered the wood bending technique while looking for a cheaper way to produce splints for the U.S. Army. When they wanted to suck the air out of the vacuum bag they used a bicycle pump. That’s right, they sucked all of the air out by hand. If you take a moment to enjoy their work, which is a labor of love, you soon realize how much character is infused in every one of their designs. This is no coincidence. Every facet is thought out from the rubber gaskets to the placement of the fasteners.

Testament to their obsession with the minutia is the manufacturing process behind the Eames lounge chair (pictured below). They ingeniously bend one large stack of ply wood then cut all four wooden components from that single piece. The Eames lounge chair remains to this day peerless. It’s design is a direct reflection of the limitations in manufacturing of the time. The radiuses on their bends can only be so tight to keep structural failure at a minimum. Though the result looks effortless and elegant it’s in the truest sense form following function.

Limitations ought to be embraced. As new process become available and possibilities are pushed toward infinity it’s reflecting on these humble artifacts from the past that we can draw inspiration. It’s not important to memorize the dates but absolutely critical to understand the why.