Our next story is about a man who is to the field of industrial design what Frank Lloyd Wright was to architecture. Brooks Stevens is this country's most renown practioner of the art and science of industrial design. That's the field that determines the shape of an office chair, the slant of a steering wheel, or the angle of a refrigerator. Brooks Stevens has designed jeeps, lawn mowers and the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile. A look now at the world of Brooks Stevens as produced by JoAnne Garrett.
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Behold a bit of genius. The happy result when a creative mind crossed a hot dog and a car. Food fashioned into a vehicle.
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The Wienermobile.
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It's an advertising concept that has become a part of our past, an American cultural icon to pass onto the kids. The Wienermobile, seen by millions, and first imagined by this man. Brooks Stevens of Mequon, Wisconsin. The face may not be familiar...
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...but all across America, all over the world, Stevens has left his mark. You will know him by his designs unsigned and everywhere. Brooks Stevens is the man who dreamed up, the man who designed the Wienermobile, the Excalibur car, the Willys Jeep, the first motor home, the rotary lawn mower. Stevens is the man who created the classic look of the Harley Davidson motorcycle. He's the guy who first thought of putting a window in a clothes dryer door. He designed the first commercial outboard motor for his friend Ralph Evinrude. And a whole industry sprang up in his wake.
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For fifty years, industrial designer Brooks Stevens has been one of the visionaries behind the shape of things to come. The shape, the look, the line, the function, the form of thousands of products. Ranging from tanks to toy trucks to toasters. Tens of thousands of designs, dreamed up by Stevens, one of the country's first industrial designers and certainly one of the best. When Brooks Stevens began, there was no field of industrial design. He helped create that, too. Back when I started this, we were called corner-rounders and hump-smoothers. That's what a designer was. "Oh, you just fix up our tin box to look better." And they thought that's all there was to it.
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There is a great deal more to it. Industrial design is concerned not only with aesthetics, but also with the safety, efficiency and cost effectiveness in both the operation and the manufacture of a product. It's an odd marriage of art, engineering and business. The creativity comes in when a designer can juggle these concerns and still make something wonderful. Something that is functional, but still fascinating...
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...to the eye of the consumer. There's no real formula or rules, other than not increasing cost, hopefully reducing cost. That's our prime objective. Or at least not more than it used to be. So that the consumer gains there. To improve the appearance, to make, to create buy appeal so that they want it. And they want it so badly they'll almost take the charge card and pay for it in the next six months. Brooks Stevens has been designing buy appeal for over 50 years. He began his career back in the late 20s. And although he has retired from active designing, the company he created still continues today under the direction of his son, Kipp. But Stevens' contribution goes well beyond the creation of his industrial design company. Stevens was also one of the creators of the field of industrial design. Because when you hit it, you want it to turn, but you want it to hold its position. There are now over 50 schools of industrial design in the United States. Tom David is the head of the Industrial Design Department at one of the best, MIAD, the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. Brooks is one of the what we call the "Six Pioneers." He really kind of decided what industrial designers do. Everybody remembers him for the Excalibur. That's maybe one of the things he did kind of for fun. It's one thing out of literally-- I'm not exaggerating-- easily 30-, 40-, 50-, 60-thousand, tens of thousands, maybe a hundred thousand different things that I have looked at. The amount and volume is overwhelming of the things he's done. It's staggering. As I said, we went through 70, 80 thousand photographs of individual things in his office. Brooks has designed literally everything. Boats, motors, locomotives, airplanes, car seating, cars, everything. David maintains that Stevens' impact on industrial design was equal to that of Flank Lloyd Wright's in architecture. But unlike Wright, Stevens is almost unknown outside of his field. David believes that in part location has determined reputation. Brooks Stevens chose to center his business in Milwaukee, close to the manufacturing centers of the nation's heartland and far from the fame of New York.
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He made that as a conscious decision. He really kind of stayed away from the centers of publicity, because they impinged on his ability to be prolific. Boy, was he ever!
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Stevens' genius was two-fold. Not only did he dream up an incredible number of new products for industry, he also dreamed of products that generated new industries.
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The first designed product was mass-produced as a snowmobile, Brooks did for the United States government for the Russians to use in 1942. Industries that generated millions of dollars. Industries that came about from Stevens' ability to imagine a need. We predicted in Detroit in 1944 that something had to be made out of the American Toledo-built Jeep vehicle. This was the soldier's savior. Its best friend. And it was going to come into the peace time have to mean something. It couldn't just be forgotten like a tank or a gun. From Stevens' prediction came the very popular Willie Jeep. A post-war classic. Stevens seemed to specialize in visionary vehicles. Brooks designed the first motorhome. And it's great. Stevens designed the first motorhome for Hib Johnson of the Johnson Wax Company. A man who had been driven to distraction by the demands of another Wisconsin designer, Frank Lloyd Wright. I've had many tearful discussions with Hib Johnson who had millions of dollars and yet he was forced to spend far more than they corporately had ever intended to spend and the lotus pad office building with glass tubes all over the place. Do you know that that was in 1930-- or 40-something that the plant and office were built. And it has been leaking ever since. You cannot fix the leak, so they do not even try anymore. They just let it rain and mop it up and go on. Eventually the leaks were repaired and Wright went on to design two other buildings for Johnson. But the story shows of the differences between these two designers. For Stevens the needs of the client, the consumer always comes first. You know, Wright really didn't give a damn about you being comfortable in your chair. But an industrial designer would say, "No, no. Let's think about what people want. What people need. How they're going to use what they want. Let's make the furniture fit the people." He's really interested in having people like their products. You know, Lawn-Boy has their-- that's the rotary mower company. They're green, because Brooks wanted them to look in the garage and see the green, the beautiful green and want to mow their lawn. That's how he thinks. That is how he thinks and how he sees the world. But Brooks Stevens may be best known to the world for what he once said. Back in the 50s a speech by Stevens contained the origin of the phrase, "Planned obsolesce." It created a furor. People misquoted him about the planned-- He called it planned product improvement. Other people misquoted him and said, "Planned obsolesce." What he intended-- I've spoken with him at great length about this. We know that we're going to manufacture new products and we know we're going to improve on them. So, let's plan for that. Really, planned obsolesce is the theory behind all product design. You improving the product every time you change it. It meant the desire to own something a little newer, a little better, a little sooner than is necessary. We absolutely captivate them with this good-looking thing that they can't wait to have and they just tremble until they get one. And if it takes a borrowing from the bank or whatever, that will do it. This is what keeps industry going. To keep interest in the product, to keep industry going. Look around you, Stevens' influence is everywhere. In every part of our daily lives, big and small.
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He's such a genius. His ability to be consistently inventive, prolific beyond your wildest dreams, like plastic plates. That's another invention of Brooks'.
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The wide-mouth peanut bar jar, because he saw somebody try to dig peanut butter out of the corner and he noticed that they always left right up at the top of the corner, they couldn't get the peanut butter out of the top of the jar. So he says, "Well, we'll make the lid as wide as the rest of..." An obvious thing, but he was the first guy to think of it.
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It's the inventiveness combined with his just absolute steadfast commitment to doing superlative work at all times, for all his clients, all the time, over 1928 to now.
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He's a real legacy in Wisconsin. Wisconsin, for all the shame Wisconsin could share for Joe McCarthy, Brooks more than makes up for it.
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