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“Practically every product in the Sears, Roebuck line I had a hand in at one time or another.” - Charles Harrison. Charles Harrison was one of the most prolific and influential black industrial designers of the twentieth century. Being one of the few early African American industrial designers and the first black executive that Sears, Roebuck & Company ever hired at its headquarter in the 60s, he specialized in designing many practical household goods emphasizing form and function. His output of innovative designs was so prodigious that it would be hard to find an item in an American household that doesn’t exemplify his utilitarian designs. Born on September 23, 1931, in Shreveport, Louisiana. His father, Charles Alfred Harrison Sr., taught industrial arts at Southern University in Louisiana. Both his parents encouraged and contributed to Harrison’s interest in design early on in his life. After getting his BFA degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) in 1954, Harrison was drafted into the U.S. Army and assigned as a cartographer in West Germany. He got out of the Army early as a graduate student in SAIC’s industrial design program, where he met his future wife, Janet and got married during his graduate years in Chicago. Harrison was hired by Sears in 1961, prompting the company to drop its unwritten policy of not hiring black people to its design staff. By the time he retired from Sears, Harrison had led the firm’s design team and had some seven hundred and fifty designs of everyday objects to his name. By the time he retired in 1993, Mr. Harrison, who was African-American, had broken through racial barriers and risen to become the chief product designer for Sears, Roebuck & Company. During his time at Sears, he had his hand in shaping the design of countless household items that Americans are familiar with: 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; a Stone Age version of the virtual reality viewer, it allowed users to look at photographs in three dimensions. Harrison was put in charge of the View-Master’s redesign in 1958 when he was working for a small design firm at the time. He made the 1939 bulky original version a lot lighter, more durable and much easier to use - even for a child. That simplicity was a hallmark of his work; Harrison was dyslexic, and he wanted his products intuitive so that you don’t need instructions for it. With that, the View-Master took off as a toy and sales blew through the roof. Although it has since gone through many iterations, the View-Master retained Mr. Harrison’s basic design for nearly four decades. It has continued to evolve for the modern digital age, into the virtual reality headsets we are familiar with today. |
In redesigning the View-Master in 1958, Mr. Harrison made it simple enough to use without instructions.
“This first of its kind, plastic garbage container was designed for Sears in 1966 and has been used by more people world-wide than any other product I designed. Because it was necessary to ship large numbers of containers, I designed them so they could nest inside each other. If the 30-gallon cans were shipped separately, 20 or 30 of them would probably fill up an entire trailer truck, but since they nested together, the same truck could carry several hundred.” - Harrison
Charles Harrison’s designs were partly driven by the rapid science advancement on new materials, especially plastic. Just like the View-Master, he was able to utilize new manufacturing processes to make lighter and cheaper household products - blenders, baby cribs, portable hair dryers. Turning to Kenmore sewing machines, sold by Sears, he made them lighter by using die-cast aluminum rather than sand-casted molded heavy metals.
A compact sewing machine and carrying case, designed by Mr. Harrison, Ted Nishigami and Kenneth Grange in 1978 and manufactured for Sears, Roebuck & Company in Japan by the Maruzen Sewing Machine Company.
He “improved the quality of life of millions of Americans through the extraordinary breadth and innovation of his product designs,” the Cooper Hewitt design museum in New York said in its citation when it gave him its National Design Award for lifetime achievement in 2008.
“Some refer to him as the Jackie Robinson of industrial design,” Nancy Perkins, an industrial designer who worked for Mr. Harrison at Sears, said in a telephone interview.
When he retired from Sears in 1993, he took on industrial design teaching positions at the University of Illinois and at Columbia College Chicago. He also made it a point to mentor students of color.
“He wanted to ensure there was a place at the table for us,” Mr. Trimmingham said. “That was a big part of his work.”
Charles Harrison died on November 29, 2018 in Santa Clarita, California from a bacterial infection. At the age of 87.
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