A few years ago, I attended the opening of the new public library in Evanston, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. The event featured the unveiling of a sculpture commissioned by internationally renowned artist Richard Hunt, who was one of my fellow students at The School of Art Institute of Chicago in the early 1950s.
As I stood near the refreshments waiting to speak with Richard after the ceremony, I saw something remarkable. The director of the Center was within earshot, so I told him, “If I had known you guys were going to display my artwork here, I would have autographed it.”
“Do you have a job here?” she asked.
“Yes, I said. “Right there, that trash can.”
“Oh, is that your can?” She answered. “If we had known that, we would have cleaned it up!”
It turns out that he had attended art school in Detroit and knew about industrial design. I designed the can in the mid-1960s while working for Sears, Roebuck and Company. Looking back on my career, it was one of the most significant and innovative products I have ever created. When that can hit the market, it did so with the biggest bang you’ve never heard: everyone was using it, but few people paid much attention to it.
Designing the can
In the early 1960s, blow molding was on the rise as a process for making housewares, and Sears used to be at the forefront of product development and innovation. Richard Palase, a Sears lab chemist, proposed making a blow molded polypropylene dumpster and recommended it to Alan Karch, a Sears buyer. With Karch’s support, Sears assigned a team of technical professionals to the challenge. I was the designer for the team, and after numerous planning sessions with the prospective manufacturer, we set the direction for the product.
However, as with all products, the devil was really in the details. We needed to meet the recommended criteria: a dark color was recommended to withstand outdoor weather and UV rays; the container needed handles to carry it from one place to another; a sloping lid shape to allow rain or melted snow to run off; and handles at the bottom to facilitate emptying. The container would also have to withstand heavy impact from drops and bumps. The lid would be designed to be easy for the owner to remove, but difficult for animals like dogs or raccoons. The form needed to be nested to maximize sending quantities. Additionally, the surface had to be textured to help prevent scratches from shipping and use.
To convince people how much better this can was than the old ones, we did a test: we froze the can at 40 degrees below zero for a couple of days, put a 50-pound bag of sand in it, and dumped it down the drain. top of a five-story building. The thing didn’t break! It just bounced.
We knew we were right, so Sears’ marketing department decided to coordinate an even bigger stunt: They dropped the can from a helicopter and it worked fine again. A patent was granted to the dumpster for the design details of its lid, which resisted opening if the dumpster was dropped or bumped from the side. The product was very successful and profitable for Sears. Other generations of design followed adding wheels and a rectangular shape to accommodate better use of interior space with full grocery bags.
Life factors in design
Throughout my career as an industrial designer, which included 33 years at Sears, 85 percent of my effort went into designing consumer products to improve the quality of people’s everyday lives. I designed everything from binoculars to cribs to televisions to toothbrushes and just about everything else, including many sewing machines. In fact, someone who had heard of my work once said, “Did you design all those sewing machines? Well, you must be the Michael Jordan of sewing machine design!”
Michael arguably changed the game of basketball, but I don’t think designers can change the world. Rather, they can take what is here and make the most of it. Form and shape work best when they seem to be there, not forced. I tried to make things look like they just belong; that they didn’t need to yell, “Look, here I am.” My best efforts resulted in products that did their job as expected: you look at it, you immediately guess what it’s supposed to do, and that’s exactly what it does. Or maybe I should say that visual statements express a harmony with why the product exists, what it does; how is it done; what it is made of, while looking nice if not beautiful.
Much of life factors into the design equation: business considerations, the social and natural sciences, art, engineering, or communications. Designing for me is living with an understanding and sensitivity to these areas, and having the ability to address a specific need, such as the need for a quieter yet durable trash can that won’t rattle or bang hard enough to wake the dead. silent. suburban street from the 1960s.
I once had a plaque on my desk that said, “How do you define a designer? You don’t define them. You describe them.”
The plaque went on to describe a person with an eye for aesthetics and a concern for profit; that he understood production and cost issues; and that he had a complete working knowledge of many materials. Above all, he described a person who preferred to design from the inside out because he was as concerned with the function of the product as he was with its appearance.