designRewind

designRewind is a rotating collection of historical design stories curated by IDSA to help keep the legacy of our great profession alive.

Heart and Soul

“The heart and soul of a company is creativity and innovation.” —Robert Iger
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Symbiosis

“Let the East learn from Western civilization. Let the West learn from the Eastern culture. In the world of freedom, we naturally create a relationship to each other.” —Isamu Noguchi
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Leadership

“The most successful leader of all is one who sees another picture not yet actualized.” —Mary Parker Follett
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Harley Earl

Harley Earl designed the 1927 GM LaSalle, the first car to be designed from bumper to bumper by a single individual, and established GM’s Art and Color Section, the first styling department for an American car manufacturer.
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Don Norman

On June 13, 1988, Don Norman published The Design of Everyday Things (originally The Psychology of Everyday Things), which popularized the term “user-centered design.”
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Raymond Patten

In 1934 Raymond E. Patten established GE’s first industrial design department, formally the Appearance Design Division, Appliance and Merchandising Department, growing the group from one to 50 people by 1946.
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Evocative

“Business, like life, is about how you make people feel. It’s that simple, and it’s that hard.” —Danny Meyer, CEO, Union Square Hospitality Group
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Cardboard Cartons

In 1879 Robert Gair, the owner of a paper bag company, invented a way to mass produce folded paperboard cartons, accelerating the birth of modern consumer packaging.
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Accessibility Pictograph

In 1968 Susanne Koefoed, a Danish graphic design student, designed a pictograph to indicate barrier-free access, with modifications by Karl Montan. Within a decade the symbol had been adopted around the globe.
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Microwave

In 1967 Amana Refrigeration, a subsidiary of Raytheon, introduced the first compact microwave oven intended for 诚信彩票网 use, the RadaRange, costing $495 (equivalent to $3,500 today).
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Splendor

“There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly.” —R. Buckminster Fuller
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Tucker

On June 19, 1947, a prototype of the 1948 Tucker was presented as the “Car of Tomorrow” at a world premier to 3,000 press, dealers and distributors held at the company’s Chicago factory.
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Toastmaster

The Toastmaster model 1B9 two-slice toaster, introduced in June 1939, had a streamlined chrome-plated shell designed by Jean Otis Reinecke that dramatically increased sales and became the standard typeform for all future toasters.
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Greta Magnusson Grossman

Grossman was a successful architect and industrial designer in both Sweden and the US. Largely forgotten, she is most known today for her Cobra lamp for which she won a MoMA Good Design award in 1950.
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Calty

In 1973 Toyota was the first Japanese automaker to establish a design studio in the US, known as Calty, a mash-up between the words “California” (its location) and “Toyota.” Honda, Nissan, Mazda, Subaru and others soon followed suit.
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Molded
Fiberglass
Chair

Herman Miller produced the Eames Molded Fiberglass Chair between 1950 and 1989, transitioning to polypropylene in 2000 and reinstituting fiberglass in 2013.
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Icsid

In June 1957 the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design was founded in London to protect the interests of practicing designers and to ensure global standards of design.
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Design History

Arthur J. Pulos’s American Design Ethic, published in June 1983, was the first comprehensive history of industrial design, stopping at World War II. Five years later he continued that history to 1975 with The American Design Adventure.
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Design Stamps

The Pioneers of American Industrial Design set of US postage stamps issued in June 2011 featured iconic works by some of the most influential designers who transformed the look of everyday life in the 20th century.
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Designers Accord

In June 2007 frog’s Design Mind newsletter published an essay by Valerie Casey about a Kyoto Treaty calling for designers to integrate sustainable thinking into every aspect of practice—today it is known as the Designers Accord.
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Moleskine

Although many famous writers have used a hardcover notebook bound in oilcloth, Moleskine brand notebooks weren’t produced until 1997. “Moleskine” was Bruce Chatwin’s name for the bound books he used, popularized in his 1986 The Songlines.
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Merimekko

Marimekko, founded in Sweden in 1951 as a textile company, made clothes and furnishings in order to sell its fabric. Its popularity exploded in the US when a photo of Jackie Kennedy wearing a Marimekko dress graced the cover of Sports Illustrated in 1960.
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Pantone

The Pantone Matching System was developed in 1963 by chemist Lawrence Herbert, who used only 10 pigments, rather than the typical 60, and created standard recipes for printers to follow to ensure uniform results.
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Italian Design

MoMA’s Italy: The New Domestic Landscape exhibit opened on May 26, 1972, showcasing the period’s avant-garde Italian design that set the tone for postmodernism.
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Sarah E. Goode

In 1885 Sarah E. Goode was the first African American women to receive a patent—for a folding cabinet bed that converted between a rolltop desk and a bed designed for people who lived in small spaces.
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Model T

In May 1927 Henry Ford announced that the Model T, 16 million of which had been produced since 1913, would be replaced by the Model A. Ford’s market share had declined to 15%, while General Motors’ had increased to 45% through improved styling.
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Lincoln Logs

Frank Lloyd Wright’s son John Lloyd Wright invented Lincoln Logs, inspired by the interlocking beams used in his father’s Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, an earthquake-proof measure, on a visit to the construction site in 1916.
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Vision

“Great ideas arise from the small details of life.” —Alvar Aalto
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Machine Age

On May 21, 1927, New Yorker magazine declared that “the machine is the tutelary symbol of universal dynamism.” The Machine Age was born, and the public’s interest in modern design spurred industry.
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Beulah Louise Henry

Beulah Louise Henry was often called “Lady Edison” for her prolific inventions in the 1920s–1960s, from umbrellas and toys to a vacuum ice cream freezer and a bobbin-less sewing machine—holding 49 patents in all.
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Kartell Sottass

In 2004 Ettore Sottsass collaborated with Kartell on a series of stools and accessories. The designs were too complex to produce until 2015 when Kartell announced that three of the pieces would be manufactured.
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Federal Design Assembly

The first Federal Design Assembly was held in Washington, DC, in 1973, a two-day event attended by Federal administrators focused on raising the government’s awareness of the importance of good design.
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Mechanical Pencil

The first known instance of the mechanical pencil dates to 1565 in a book by the naturalist Konrad Gesner that contained a drawing of an implement for taking field notes in which a piece of graphite was inserted into a wooden sheath.
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Maker Faire

The first Maker Faire was held in 2006 in the Bay Area. In 2014, 131 Maker Faires or Mini Maker Faires were held around the globe.
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Century of Progress

The Century of Progress World’s Fair in Chicago opened in May 1933 with exhibits designed by many future industrial designers, including Buckminster Fuller, Raymond Patten, Dave Chapman and Jean Reinecke.
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Monobloc Chair

Despite its ubiquity around the globe today, the origins of the one-piece polypropylene Monobloc chair, first manufactured in the 1970s, are unrecorded. The chair is easily manufactured, taking only 70 seconds and costing as little as $3.
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Be a Good
Host

“The role of the designer is that of a very good, thoughtful host anticipating the needs of his guests.” —Charles Eames
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Scotch Tape

In 1931, 3M introduced Scotch cellophane tape. Invented by Richard G. Drew, it was initially devised as a waterproof sealer for food packaging.
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Education

At a conference about modern design pedagogy in 1940 Frederick Kiesler declared, “Architectural education’s primary purpose is to teach students to think for themselves.”
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Rules of Nature

“I am convinced that we can attain an acceptable degree of comfort by following the rules of nature.” —Stefan Behnisch
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Obsoletism

In What Consumer Engineering Really Is: A New Technique for Prosperity (1932), Egmont Arens proposed making current designs obsolete by designing new modern styles, enabling manufacturers to increase production and reverse the Depression.
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DayGlo Paint

Robert and Joseph Switzer devised the idea for photoluminescent paint in the 1930s when using naturally fluorescing compounds in amateur magic shows. Military applications in World War II popularized the paint.
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AUDAC

In 1927 a group of industrial designers and artists formed the American Union of Decorative Artists and Craftsmen to promote American design and to protect their designs from being pirated by manufacturers.
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Philadelphia School of Design for Women

In 1848, Sarah W. Peter started what is now Moore College of Art & Design to give women training in textiles, wallpaper design, wood engraving and other artistic skills.
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Bresslergroup

Peter Bressler, FIDSA founded Designs for Medicine, Inc. (now Bresslergroup) on May 5, 1970, with the licensing of the Stand-Up Wheelchair, his thesis project, for which he received an IDSA Student Merit award.
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Design for Disassembly

In 1991 Budd Steinhilber and Tom David appeared in a segment on ID on NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw and introduced the concept of waste reduction through design for disassembly.
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Conscience

“In the end this most prosperous and glamorous and complicated of professions comes down to a thing that is very old and very simple: one man’s integrity against another’s, one man’s capacity as a working artist against another’s, the vision with which he establishes his standards and the courage with which he sticks by them. The rest is trimming.” —George Nelson
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Tin Can

Frustrated by the difficulty of procuring fresh food for his army, in 1795 Napoleon Bonaparte offered a prize to w诚信彩票网ver could devise a solution for preserving food, which spurred the invention of the tin can 15 years later.
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Anne Swainson

Montgomery Ward hired Anne Swainson in 1931 to establish the company’s Bureau of Design, overseeing a staff who designed everything from tires to toasters tp the company’s catalog and enabled it to make a quick recovery from the Depression.
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Streamliner
Meat Slicer

Egmont Arens and Theodore Brookhart’s 1940 Streamliner Meat Slicer, still in use at delicatessens across the nation, featured rounded streamlined forms that made operation and cleaning easier.
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