Word: stumpf
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...disappointed that Wachovia won't remain independent but I believe the strength and stability of having Wells Fargo as a partner will be better in the long run," says Michael Smith of Charlotte Center City Partners. At a merger rally held on October 15, Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf wouldn't be pinned down on how many jobs might be lost, but he did say that Charlotte would be the combined banks' eastern headquarters...
During the late '70s and early '80s, office-furniture manufacturers scrambled to get Ergon knockoffs on the market. "Ergonomics went down the tube," says Stumpf, "when it became just a marketing buzz word." Stumpf, meanwhile, carried on his experiments. He had built twelve prototypes for the Ergon; for the Equa, designed in collaboration with Don Chadwick, there were 27. Before Equa, there were two kinds of office chairs: seat and back could be separate, as in Ergon, or they could be one solid shell. Stumpf and Chadwick found a new material (Du Pont's Rynite, a reinforced fiber glass...
Having topped himself, Stumpf yearns to broaden his range. "To tell you the truth," he says, "I'm bored with designing for the office. Bored stiff." Among the things he would like to design are baby strollers that do not jiggle, an airplane with an observation deck, a taxicab with a glass roof, and police uniforms and cars that "don't scare the hell out of kids." His manner is sparky, one part anger to two parts joy, like a more thoughtful, humble Lee lacocca. "Ninety-five per-cent of industrial designers don't design," he says. "They are essentially...
...Stumpf wants the best parts of childhood made available again, the mixture of surprise and ritual, comfort and wonder. Images of his own youth in a polyglot St. Louis neighborhood pop up again and again in his conversations about design. "I used to crawl behind the radio," says Stumpf, son and grandson of engineers, "and stare at the tubes." Almost every machine, he says, is at some level a toy. "The concept of jauntiness is a quality lost completely in design. It is a wonderful quality. The horse and buggy had it." By jaunty he does not mean arch...
...ambitions of such hipster objects, he worries, are misleading design students. "They all want to do teapots," he says. "It's like all their nerve endings are connected directly to their eyes. Technology is a nonsubject to them. They want to design, but they don't want to build." Stumpf, a big, lusty child of the Midwest, wants to make things that work as well as delight. --By Kurt Andersen