6065: Charles A. Harrison, World-Class Designer.

MultiCultClassics has joked about the repeated use of Black inventors as advertising concepts. However, the gentleman spotlighted in the Chicago Sun-Times story below definitely deserves recognition and respect. Read about Charles A. Harrison now.

Impact of an ‘invisible’ man

SCI-TECH SCENE | Black industrial designer’s work will be honored at Smithsonian

By Sandra Guy, Sun-Times Columnist

Who knew that hours of fun with the View Master (you remember, the 1960s-era 3D viewer with the sliding disk of photos) started with Evanston industrial designer and teacher Charles A. Harrison?

Harrison, 76, is responsible for the design of everyday items we take for granted such as lightweight sewing machines and plastic garbage cans with wheels. Indeed, he has created and improved upon 750 products from radios to fondue pots to cordless shavers to hair dryers.

Harrison’s efforts have garnered him the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, which hailed him as improving “the quality of life for millions of Americans through the extraordinary breadth and innovation of his product designs.” He will be honored at the Cooper-Hewitt in New York on Oct. 23.

“As much as anyone, [Harrison] is responsible for the look of the consumer revolution,” said Tim Brown, CEO of Ideo, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based design firm, and chairman of the awards jury.

“It’s remarkable that one person could have had that much of an impact, somewhat invisibly. This is someone we haven’t heard of, and we should be celebrating his career. … He ought to be a great role model.”

Ph.D.s at post office

Harrison, who drafted maps of war targets while serving in the Korean War, remembers being refused a job in the late 1950s because of his race, even though he had just graduated second in his class from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

“There were no equal opportunity programs, and [companies] weren’t hiring African Americans in any jobs above labor,” he said. “There were more Ph.D.s in the post office in those days than you can imagine.”

Harrison finally got work in 1956 as a free-lance designer for Sears, Roebuck. Just as Sears’ free-lance budget was running out, he was hired as a furniture designer at the American Furniture Mart working for one of his professors, the celebrated Austrian designer Henry Glass.

Harrison worked stints at two small design companies before he got a call from Sears to come back as a manager. In 1961, he became the first African American to hold an executive job at Sears’ headquarters. Harrison stayed for 32 years and retired in 1993.

Technology played a big role in Harrison’s work, which dovetailed with the consumer revolution.

New manufacturing processes allowed industrial designers to add aesthetic appeal to everyday items, and people who lived through the Great Depression were hungry to improve their lives.

“We started looking at human interaction with a product. Was the product confusing? Were the knobs in a convenient spot? Were the controls easy to handle or easy to read?” Harrison said.

Suddenly, the washing machine was no longer a monstrosity hidden under the porch, and furniture evolved from wood into steel, metal, plastic and particle board, while sewing machines previously made of cast iron became lighter with plastic and electronic parts.

“I describe design as a three-sided discipline of art, science and business,” said Harrison, who teaches industrial and product design at Columbia College and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. “Art was a much longer side of that triangle in the beginning. It’s an equilateral triangle today.”

Plastic garbage can

Harrison got the chance to upgrade the View Master in 1958 when he was working at Robert Podall Associates at Wacker and Michigan.

Harrison redesigned the View Master so that it could be made by injection molding, which made it lighter, and gave it its bright color.

“We got the cost down and made it priced low enough to let children play with it,” he said.

The plastic garbage can started with a Sears scientist who came to Harrison with the idea of making the can out of polyethylene polymer rather than metal.

After a Sears buyer OKd the project, Harrison went to work.

“We were the first to blow-mold a product that large,” he said. The trash can’s improvements included hand grips and a sloped lid so that water and snow could run off.

Harrison said Sears’ designers tested the new garbage can’s durability by throwing it out of the lab’s fourth-floor window onto a parking lot.

“A big roar went up with applause and cheers when the trash can bounced,” he said. “We had a can that wouldn’t rust, wouldn’t dent, and had a memory -- the lid would come back if it was run over.”

Sears designed the garbage cans so they could be stacked up, and then wheels could be attached.

Harrison quickly puts a worldly spin on the seemingly mundane.

“In [designers’] training, our charge is to improve things,” he said. “You ask, ‘Now what can we contribute to mankind, to society, that makes people’s lives better, that makes them smile?’”