Charles Harrison

Industrial designer who made the View-master an icon

Charles Harrison, an industrial designer who rethought hundreds of ordinary items, including a plastic waste bin on wheels, a see-through measuring cup and the 3D View-master, died on 29 November in Santa Clarita, California. He was 87.

The cause was a bacterial infection, said his son, Charles Harrison III.

Harrison was a designer, not an inventor; his mission was refashioning consumer products so they could be massproduced, pleasing to the eye and conducive to easier living.

He was part of a golden age of industrial design, a time after the Second World War when newly prosperous families were eager to acquire the products they saw advertised on their boxy TV sets. With goods flooding the marketplace, design became a crucial element for manufacturers competing for attention and sales.

By the time he retired in 1993, Harrison, who was African-american, had broken through racial barriers and risen to become the chief product designer for Sears, Roebuck & Co. When he was hired at Sears headquarters in Chicago in 1961, he was the first black executive there.

At Sears, he had a hand in shaping versions of countless items that Americans in the second half of the 20th century realised they needed: the riding lawn mower, the cordless shaver and the Dial-o-matic Food Cutter, among more than 750 products for Sears alone.

The product he was most closely associated with was the View-master, which allowed users to look at photographs in three dimensions. Two inventors introduced the first version, a bulky model, at the World’s Fair in 1939, and it became a specialty item used mainly by photographers.

When Harrison, who was working for a small design firm at the time, was put in charge of its redesign in 1958, he made it lighter, more durable and much easier to use — easy enough for a child. That simplicity was one of the hallmarks of his work; he was dyslexic, and wanted to make all his products intuitive so no one would have to read the instructions. With that, the View-master took off as a toy. When its colour was later changed from beige to red, it appealed more to children and became a must-have for the expanding baby-boomer generation. Sales went through the roof. Although it has since gone through many versions, the View-master retained Harrison’s basic design for nearly four decades.

“What he strove to do with all of his designs was to make their use self-evident,” Joeffrey Trimmingham, a designer and former student of Harrison who became a business partner, said. “Because he was dyslexic, he wanted you to be able to just see how they worked.”

The product of which Harrison was most proud was the first plastic waste bin. Until the early 1960s, bins were round and made of galvanised steel, making them heavy and awkward to carry. But advances in plastics prompted him and a fellow Sears employee to wonder if a mould could be made that was big enough to create a polypropylene waste bin. “There was nothing produced that large up to that point using that process,” Trimmingham said. Harrison’s 1963 design not only lightened the waste bin, it changed the shape to rectangular and added wheels, making it the basic design for bins now visible all over the US. As Harrison said of his achievement, “No more clang-clang of metal before breakfast.”

Harrison’s creativity was driven in part by the rapidly evolving science of plastics and other materials. Just as he had done with the Viewmaster, he used new manufacturing processes to come up with lighter and cheaper household products – blenders, baby cribs, portable hair dryers.

He “improved the quality of life of millions of Americans through the extraordinary breadth and innovation of his product designs,” the citation read when the Cooper Hewitt design museum in New York gave him its National Design Award for lifetime achievement in 2008.

Charles Albert Harrison Jr. was born in Shreveport, Louisiana, on 23 September 1931. His father taught industrial arts at Prairie View A&M University, a historically black university in Prairie View, Texas. His mother, Cora Lee (Smith) Harrison, had gone back to her parents’ house in Shreveport for the birth, since many hospitals at the time did not welcome blacks.

He said he learned from his father, who was also a carpenter, to appreciate how things were built, and from his mother to appreciate design in flowers and plants. “The most beautiful thing that exists is an egg,” he once said. “Its form is just perfect.”

The family moved to Phoenix, where the elder Harrison taught woodwork at the Phoenix Union Coloured High School, from which young Charles graduated in 1948. He went on to attend the prestigious School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His education was interrupted when he was drafted into the Army in the mid-1950s. He was stationed in Germany, where he served as a cartographer. When he returned to Chicago, he married Janet Eleanor Simpson. In addition to their son, Charles, he is survived by two grandsons. His wife died in 1999.

Harrison dropped out of art school because he was broke and couldn’t find a job. He said he had good references from professors, but when he showed up for openings and potential employers saw he was black, “they suddenly no longer needed anyone.”

Friends at small design firms took him on for short stints as he pounded the pavement. He talked to Sears and was told the firm had an unwritten policy against hiring Africanamericans, but the manager liked him and gave him freelance jobs. In 1961, Sears overrode its unwritten policy and hired him.

When Harrison retired, he took several teaching positions and made it a point to mentor students of colour.

“He wanted to ensure there was a place at the table for us,” Trimmingham said. “That was a big part of his work.” KATHARINE Q SEELYE