Chuck Harrison, Adding Dimension to Design

"It was very tough," Harrison says. "I uncovered every rock in Chicago. People wanted to help me. I stumbled around."

Sears opened the door in 1961, allowing Harrison to become "one of a small number of black executives in all of corporate America," as Victor Margolin, professor of design history at the University of Illinois at Chicago, writes in the foreword to Harrison's book.

Harrison says he rose in the workaday world "despite a long list of despites." In humble mass-market housewares and consumer products, he found the opportunity to express his artistic spirit while easing the stresses of everyday living for millions of strangers.

"This is a fundamental part of who I am," he says.

Harrison traveled the world as a designer. The objects he developed -- cutting-edge steam irons, electric frying pans, mixers, juicers, televisions -- defined the burgeoning consumer class.

"I tried to make things appear as if they just belong. . . . They didn't need to scream," he says in the book. "My best efforts resulted in products that did their job as expected -- you look at it, right away guess what it is supposed to do, and that's exactly what it does."

By 1993, Sears had downsized. The entire design department was eliminated and Harrison retired. He notes today that Sears has begun to reconstitute its design group to compete with Target and Wal-Mart.

Despite the omnipresence of design in the modern world -- from Hollywood sets to supermarket toothbrushes -- there are few designers of color, whose professional development FocusOnDesign, based at the Washington Design Center, seeks to foster.

Harrison was not the first African American designer; Margolin counts two other major talents who preceded him: McKinley Thompson, an auto designer in the 1950s at General Motors, and Georg Olden, who directed on-air graphics for CBS in the 1940s.

For Harrison, design was its own reward: "I came into my own as an artist and human being."

"I think I'm pretty good," he adds.