Industrial Designer's Work is a Fixture in American Homes

Crisis, The, Jan/Feb 2007 by Hopkinson, Natalie

DESIGN

The man who perfected the View-Master children's toy, designed the portable turntable technology beloved by hip hop deejays and developed innovative radio technology in the 1950s, is surprisingly allergic to gadgets. If you really want to get Charles "Chuck" Harrison's blood pumping, ask the pioneering Black industrial designer about those hi-tech thingamajigs that shoot photos, do math, play games, manage schedules - also known as "cell phones."

"It boggles the mind," says Harrison, the 75-year-old former Sears product designer and college instructor based in Chicago. "We just continue to add features to products that don't need the features to begin with. Who really needs a camera on a cell phone?

"We did that with clocks for years. We put clocks on everything. Walk into your kitchen, there's a clock on the range, the clock on the microwave. You might have five clocks and none of them agree... clock overload."

Harrison is a back-to-basics kind of guy. This approach served him well in the 1950s. He was among the first Blacks to enter the field of industrial design that sprang up to take advantage of the burgeoning consumer market at the then-leading retailer Sears, Roebuck and Co., his employer for 33 years.

Company men like Harrison were expected to churn out roughly one idea per hour for a wide range of products that were being manufactured in large volumes in the thousands for the first time. Hundreds of products designed or improved by Harrison endure to this day, including innovations in furniture design, the first non-metallic garbage can, sewing machines, steam irons, the riding lawnmower. All the while, he blazed a trail for other Black designers coming after him.

Americans "rarely go in a house that doesn't have a design he's worked on," said Joeffrey Trimmingham, design principal at IBIS, a marketing communications firm in Chicago. Trimmingham addressed an audience gathered in Washington in October for the FocusOnDESIGN Lifetime Achievement Design Awards Gala, at which Harrison was the keynote speaker and honoree. FocusOnDESIGN is a collaboration of several design organizations whose mission is to "provide designers of diverse backgrounds a forum for professional development, economic empowerment and social accountability. (Harrison was also honored recently by The Industrial Designers Society of America.)

During a speech at the awards gala, Harrison shared his experiences, which he also wrote about in his recently published memoir, A Life's Design: The Life and Work of Industrial Designer Charles Harrison.

The son of a college professor who lived in rural Louisiana and Texas and later Arizona, Harrison grew up in a household in which money was tight. He made do with the necessities and became skilled at solving problems. "That set the stage for the rest of my life," Harrison says. He learned to fix everything because he "wanted to see [things] live forever. I don't buy into forced obsolescence."

As a child, Harrison struggled in school because of dyslexia, but he eventually discovered a talent for art. Industrial design seemed to him to be the most practical field to pursue and he did so by enrolling in City College of San Francisco. After earning a two-year degree there, he entered the Art Institute of Chicago in 1949 and began designing custom furniture for an interior design firm before he graduated in 1954. That same year, he was drafted into the military, where he worked as a cartographer, making maps while stationed in Germany.

After a two-year tour in Germany, Harrison was discharged a few months early because he had been accepted to graduate school. He needed to work while pursuing his studies, but he struggled to find a job in his field. For years Sears refused to hire him. Harrison says a Sears executive admitted to him that the company had an unwritten policy against hiring Blacks. To get around it, he hired Harrison on a freelance basis. He was employed by a smaller firm and worked on several contracts for Sears.

According to his book, A Life's Design, in 1961 the Sears executive called Harrison and said, "Well, Chuck, we can hire you now." He accepted and later finally earned his MFA in 1963.

Harrison is probably best known for his work updating the design of the View-Master - lowering production costs of the children's toy and incorporating new features and engineering improvements - which he did before joining Sears.

"I designed this in 1958," Harrison said at the gala, pointing to a photo of the View-Master projected on a large screen. "It ran just like you see it, until a couple of years ago."

Harrison traveled for Sears several times a week, contracting with various manufacturing companies and determining which products needed to be updated. Over the years, several of his other ideas made their way into production: a shoe buffer, a remote-control hair dryer. Then, there is the phonograph record turntable that he placed inside a suitcase to make portable. The design remains a favorite of hip-hop deejays. "There are some audiophiles who think this is still the best sound," Harrison explains.