William Alan Fetter

William Alan Fetter was born in 1928 in Independence, Missouri. He studied art and graphic design at the University of Illinois, where he earned a BFA in 1952 while designing publications and exhibitions for the university press. After graduation, he became art director at Family Weekly in Chicago, where he began experimenting with automated page layouts. In 1959 he joined the Boeing Company in Wichita as supervisor of advanced design graphics, later transferring to Seattle in 1963 to lead the newly formed Computer Graphics Group. His work focused on ergonomic analysis and visualization for aircraft design. In 1970 he briefly worked in Los Angeles, producing one of the first television commercials using computer graphics for Norelco, before moving to Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, where he chaired the Design Department and worked alongside Buckminster Fuller.

At Boeing, Fetter led one of the earliest projects to use computers for ergonomic visualization and cockpit perspective studies. Working with engineers Walter Bernhardt and Richard Reinhardt, he translated his chalkboard sketches of human figures and interiors into mathematical formulas that programmers implemented on the company’s IBM 7094 and CDC 6600 systems. The output, plotted with a Gerber pen plotter, produced the first three-dimensional computer models of the human figure, known as First Man or Boeing Man. These figures, originally developed to test pilot reach and field of vision in virtual cockpits, became icons of early digital imagery. Fetter emphasized precision and predictability over chance, setting his work apart from contemporaneous computer art by treating graphics as applied research that could shape ergonomics, design, and communication. His writings, including Computer Graphics in Communication from 1964 and later essays for Design Quarterly and IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, documented his methods and argued for the deliberate application of computing to creative work. Beyond industry, he co-founded the Northwest chapter of Experiments in Art and Technology in 1968 with LaMar Harrington, facilitating collaborations between artists and engineers in Seattle, including Doris Chase’s computer-generated film Circles I.

Fetter’s Human Figure was exhibited internationally in the late 1960s, beginning with Cybernetic Serendipity at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 1968, where it was also included in the Motif Editions print portfolio alongside works by Charles Csuri and the Computer Technique Group. His figures appeared the following year in Tendencies 4: Computers and Visual Research in Zagreb, and in 1986 his early plotter drawing H32569 was shown in SIGGRAPH: A Retrospective. Today his works are held in the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Science Museum Group, and the Buffalo AKG Art Museum. William Fetter passed away in Seattle in 2002.