(the last president of ASID) and Tucker Madawick (the last president of IDI) as vice presidents; George Payne, FIDSA as treasurer; and Beck as secretary. IDSA settled into new headquarters on West 55th Street in New York. At the time, IDSA had a total membership of about 650: approximately 50 from IDEA, 200 from ASID and 400 from IDI. IDSA had a successful first year without a hitch. Well, there was one. IDSA had agreed in the merger negotiations to continue the annual national design awards originated by IDI in 1951. At the first IDSA annual meeting in the fall of 1965, it did so under the banner of IDSA, but that was the last time. The problem was that the awards program required that all the individual designers of a product needed to be credited for the design. This was in direct conflict with the traditional practice of famous designers who, as a matter of policy, insisted on crediting only themselves, no matter who did the actual design. Their rationale was that clients specifically hired industrial design firms because of the reputation of their famous founder, and demanded that the design of their product be credited to that individual. One of these famous designers was Dreyfuss, who was adamant about the issue and was now president of IDSA. So after the 1965 national IDI design awards, IDSA sponsored no more for the next 15 years. In 1980, after Dreyfuss and Teague had passed away, and Loewy at age 87 had no problem with the practice of full credits for designs, IDSA resumed the annual Industrial Design Excellence Awards (IDEA) program, now known as the International Design Excellence Awards, which continues to this day providing recognition and promotion of hundreds of domestic and international industrial designers. IDSA has fulfilled its original promise of representing the US profession as a single voice to the world. More than that, it has grown to well over 3,000 members with a fine professional staff of 15; 30 local chapters in five geographical districts, each with an annual conference; an award-winning professional journal; and an international design awards program at its annual conference. So as IDSA celebrates its 50th birthday on March 5, may I wish it many happy returns and a long, successful life into the future.
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been granted since 1951 and to continue the ASID series of annual meetings on special subjects. The major guest speaker, Misha Black of England, explored the dichotomy between art/design and science. His conclusion was that the task of the designer was to sift research and analysis for those facts that could be used as the basis for a creative design decision. Black suggested, according to Pulos, that the importance of designers was dependent upon their ability to spring forward to new solutions, to create new forms and a new unity in order to produce something that had never existed before. That was the first national design meeting I ever attended; I was receiving my first national IDI design award for a Hoover vacuum cleaner. I was a young 34-year-old guest of Robert Hose, FIDSA, Hoover’s design consultant at the time and a past president of the Society of Industrial Designers, who had encouraged me to apply for membership and join ASID in 1962. At the time, I was a senior designer at The Hoover Company, and in order to apply for membership I was required to submit three products I had designed from different industries that had reached final production. I submitted a vacuum cleaner, a floor polisher and a chemical bottle, all made by Hoover, which ASID accepted as if made by different industries. I also had to submit three letters of recommendation from existing members of ASID and a formal portfolio of my work. In 1967, five years later, I would begin my long leadership career in IDSA as secretarytreasurer of the Ohio Valley Chapter. After their joint annual meeting in October 1964, Hose of ASID and Joseph Parriott, FIDSA of IDI concluded the merger, which was followed immediately by the absorption of IDEA to create a single voice for industrial design in the United States. Board members of IDI and ASID met in New York on January 25, 1965, to sign the legal documents required to formally establish IDSA, and on March 5 IDSA was incorporated by the state of New York. The new board of directors, which was drawn from the two parent organizations, included Dreyfuss as president; Vassos as chairman of the board; Hose, Parriott, Donald Dailey, FIDSA
—Carroll Gantz, FIDSA carrgantz@bellsouth.net
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