Anonymous Design

By Henry Petroski

In the season of presents, take some time to think about the people who developed the stuff that fills our everyday lives.

This Article From Issue

November-December 2014

Volume 102, Number 6

Page 414

DOI: 10.1511/2014.111.414

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As I unwrapped a present last Christmas, my daughter-in-law mentioned in passing that she was always on the lookout for gifts for engineers. She had long been shopping for engineering-themed gifts for her father, who is a mechanical engineer, and now she does so for me as well. One of the things that caught her eye this year was a clock with visible gears, and that was the gift I was opening.

A moving-gear clock has no designer’s name associated with it. Many consumer products are similarly anonymous, although there are striking examples of named designs, one example being an Eames chair (top left, with red seat). Some other products are well known by brand but not by designer, even if that person is not anonymous. For instance, the KitchenAid stand mixer (middle right) was designed by Egmont Arens in 1937.

Illustration by Tom Dunne, with images from Wikimedia Commons and courtesy of Maple’s Clock.

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