Intelligent Designer
Charles Harrison, former industrial designer at Sears, Roebuck and Company, created practical innovations that touched many lives
- Smithsonian magazine, January 2009, Subscribe
In 1966, Charles "Chuck" Harrison, an industrial designer at Sears, Roebuck & Company, got rid of an everyday nuisance—the early-morning clanging of metal garbage cans—by creating the first-ever plastic garbage bin. "When that can hit the market, it did so with the biggest bang you never heard," wrote Harrison in his 2005 book, A Life's Design. "Everyone was using it, but few people paid close attention to it."
And so it was for some 600 other household products that Harrison designed over his 32 years at Sears—everything from blenders to baby cribs, hair dryers to hedge clippers. Consumers snatched his wares from store shelves and ordered them from Sears' catalog. And yet few stopped to consider their maker, who at times sketched one or two product ideas an hour at his drafting table. Giving credit where credit is due, the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum recently honored Harrison with its Lifetime Achievement Award.
Harrison's consumers were both housewives who wanted something more sophisticated than their mothers' inelegant, Depression-era eggbeaters, and their husbands, who took pride in their riding lawn mowers. They valued aesthetics, and so did Harrison, as long as they didn't take precedence over function. "If you look at his products, there's really nothing superfluous about them," says Bob Johnson, a former vice president at Sears.
Not surprisingly, Harrison's pet peeve is seeing a bell or whistle added to an appliance, only to have it break or become vestigial. "If it doesn't do what it's supposed to do or look like what it does, then I frown on it. I don't think a nutcracker needs to look like an elephant," says Harrison, with a laugh.
Harrison's objective to make things fit in rather than stand out mirrored his own efforts as an African-American forging a career in the industrial design field. Sears turned him down in 1956; he says a manager told him that there was an unwritten policy against hiring black people. But he found freelance work at Sears and work at a few furniture and electronics firms. (He redesigned the popular View-Master at one job.) In 1961, Sears reconsidered and Harrison joined its 20-person product design and testing laboratory. He eventually rose to become the company's first black executive.
He was also the last industrial designer to leave, in 1993, when Sears did away with its in-house design team. Harrison, 77, now teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Columbia College Chicago. He is lenient when it comes to making his students consider what their designs might cost. "That can spoil a good piece of pie," he says. But he draws a hard line when it comes to quality. After all, he says, "What designers do will affect so many people."
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Related topics: Industrial Design Innovation
Additional Sources
A Life's Design, by Charles Harrison, Ibis Design Inc. (Chicago), 2005
Comments (6)
Thanks for this story and illustration, and kudoes to Mr. Harrison. I recently bought a Kenmore 158.1040 sewing machine similar to the one pictured, and it is a joy to use. Good design is a gift to a better life, and I thank Mr. Harrison for the respect he shows users.
Posted by K. Sullivan on January 25,2012 | 01:50 PM
Proof's to show no matter where you come from or what your skin color is, a great designer is a great designer! As a young industrial designer myself I can still remember when I was a kid and had my VIEW MASTER which gave me countless hours of entertainment! Thanks Charles.:)
Posted by Serge on May 14,2009 | 02:36 PM
I still have my 1972 Kenmore sewing machine as pictured in the article and it still stitches beautifully. It has become quite collectible nowadays; and I am thrilled to know more about the gentleman who designed it. Good Job, Mr Harrison! The style and quality has endured.
Posted by Deena Flanigan on February 26,2009 | 11:02 PM
I loved my viewmaster! I had no idea that it and the plastic trash can were designed by the same man. Good for him, and Thanks!
Posted by Sharon Cornell on January 15,2009 | 03:41 PM
I'm 24 and I remember view-masters like it was yesterday.
Posted by Daniel Weston on January 14,2009 | 09:10 PM
Brilliant indeed, Charles Harrison is to home industry design what George Washington Carver was to agriculture.
Posted by paul reimers on January 12,2009 | 11:43 PM
Charles Harrison is one of those rare individuals that makes America great. The ironic part is the struggle he had to go though to prove his worth. I'm appreciative that he maintained his determination to follow his interests in spite of the dolts he encountered.
Posted by M Cragin on January 11,2009 | 07:35 PM
I had to go into my closet and pull out my box and look at my original VIEW MASTER. It survived a tornado in tact along with a dozen discs. I am 62 years old and get laughs out of people whenever I pull it out and they try to guess what it is! What would our generation have been without creative and imaginative people like Charles Harrison, hate to think of it.
Posted by J. Owen on December 26,2008 | 02:42 PM