Control Switches - CARLI Digital Collections Featured Image

It's easy enough to write about a self-selected image. Game for a challenge, this time I asked my partner-in-writing from last year, Mary Rose, to choose for me. She responded with three intriguing options from UIC's Design Collection.

I could have waxed poetic about the sleek chrominess of a toaster or reflected on the concept of portability as contrasted between an early '70s phonograph and today's technology. But no, for me it had to be the control switch rendered by C. A. Harrison in 1962.

What's not to like about this image?!?! I like wondering what this device might have been designed to control. I like the minimalism of the design: symmetry in the form of a central switch box with two levers and a decorative eight-point starburst in the middle. I like that you have to stand on your head to read the switch labels. (Just kidding! Try using CONTENTdm's rotate feature instead.) I even like that both words in the supplied title can function as either nouns or verbs: Control switches? Control switches!

If that last little factoid didn't blow your mind, then you ought to read up on the industrial designer. The 95 items in this digital collection are drawn from the Charles Harrison Papers held in UIC's Special Collections; most though not all were drawn by the man himself. This control switch would have been among Harrison's earliest designs for Sears Roebuck, where he spent most of his professional career, hiring on in 1961 as a designer and retiring in 1993 as the company's first African-American executive. He also designed the View-Master! (Note: not included in this collection. And technically, he led the redesign team that produced the 1958 Model F--nonetheless one of his numerous impressive distinctions.)

Anyway, it's been fun switching things up (bad pun alert). Turns out it's not so difficult to write about an image chosen by someone else--especially when it's a simply spectacular design.

Written by Ellen K. Corrigan, Assistant Professor, Cataloging Services, Booth Library, Eastern Illinois University

For more information about this and other CARLI Digital Collections, visit http://collections.carli.illinois.edu

To learn more about becoming part of CARLI Digital Collections and using CONTENTdm, see http://www.carli.illinois.edu/products-services/contentdm and http://wiki.carli.illinois.edu/index.php/Portal:CONTENTdm.