"Design is a Silent Salesman"

Amy Koepke:

The Renovated Creations of Henry Dreyfuss

Henry Dreyfuss is the face of modernization in the early 1900’s. Unlike other designers, Dreyfuss used creativity and knowledge to recreate nearly every object we use today. When you look in your kitchen and see a refrigerator, Dreyfuss reinvented that object to make it for efficient and more useful for us. When you fly in a plane, he made it as luxurious as it is with his renovations. When you write homework assignments with a pen or pencil, Dreyfuss is the reason you do not need to use ink and a metal writing utensil. During his time, Henry Dreyfuss looked around at the world and wondered how he could make the things we have easier to use and more efficient. Dreyfuss began designing post-World War I, inspiring his desire to make affordable and resourceful products for his day and age (Heskett). By the end of his life, this industrial designer had remade hundreds of manufactured products and pushed us into an era of modernism. Although he was not one for style, Dreyfuss reinvented the function of art with his theory that practicality is most important when making a successful creation and found a way to improve the things we needed for decades.

Dreyfuss’s success goes all the way back to when he was just 5 years old. As a young boy, he watched his father create theatrical plays and characters, and he too began to find an interest in this business. By age 15, his interest had shifted to recreating costuming and scenes to bring the plays to life. By this time, Dreyfuss was almost a professional, creating costuming for pageants, as well as scenery and special effects in Broadway. A year later, he created his first reinvented object, a colossal piano that was 30 feet along and allowed for 4 girls to play at the same time. Unfortunately his first creation was never seen because it was too large to fit through the theatre doors, but it proved to the theatrical and design world that he was capable of redesigning on a larger scale (Johnston).

His popularity in Broadway as a designer soon spread beyond and into the hands of companies such as Macy’s. In 1927, Dreyfuss was offered his first corporate job position, working as a designer at Macy’s in New York. He was asked to scale the store and choose objects that he wanted to remake so that customers would be more satisfied with Macy’s products. He looked around the store, testing out numerous appliances and materials and came back with his answer: nothing was satisfactory. Dirt poor but defiant, Dreyfuss turned down the Macy’s job and decided that he wanted to be self-employed for the rest of his life. This he carried out quite well. In 1930, Dreyfuss opened up his own studio office in New York on 5^th Avenue. It was small but manageable, with no furniture, just his raw ideas for improving the world of invention. He began his business with one simple method; he sent out letters to major manufacturers with the logo and motto, “Design is a Silent Salesman,” in each letter. He signed his name with a self-created pen that enabled a single stroke to be made without running out of ink (Johnston).

From his letters, his business quickly took off. His first job was for a cigarette lighter company in which he used a new plastic material, catalin, to create its casing. Soon after, he was invited to work with the Bell Telephone Laboratories, along with other designers, to try to recreate the telephone so that the mouthpiece and receiver were connected. Unlike the other designers, Dreyfuss was more involved. He demanded that if he was to work on this project, he wanted to work alongside a telephone engineer who could explain the electronic parts of the phone. It was about more than the look of the new model to him, it was about the practicality of the model and how easily it could be made. Out of all the designers, Dreyfuss made the only model that was feasible to recreate. He was the first to create the modern telephone as we know it today.

From here, the jobs kept coming to him. He expanded his workforce and hired more designers to help him create the best renovations possible. Founded in 1929, what is now known as “Henry Dreyfuss Associates” was taking off. Dreyfuss was able to redesign nearly anything. Some of his most popular reconstructed items include pens, pencils, typewriters, can openers, stoves, pots and pans, plates, metal office desks, farm machinery, tires, rubber floor mats, gymnasiums, dance halls, egg beaters, waffle makers, dentist chairs, the Hoover vacuum, new diners, luxury interiors in planes, trains, cars, and hotels, and hundreds of other objects that we use in everyday life. Anything that could use improvement, Dreyfuss was able to improve. As his popularity skyrocketed, so did the number of companies he was working with (hda.net).

One of Dreyfuss’s morals, however, was to never let money come in the way of design. In all of his designs, he only remade objects if they would be of use to the general public not because a corporation was paying him to do so. Before agreeing to renovate a company’s product, Dreyfuss tried it out. He used washers and refrigerators, cooked with utensils in question, rode in planes and trains before recreating them, stayed at hotel rooms, and even tried out farming machinery. As stated by Alva Johnston in her article “Nothing Looks Right to Dreyfuss,” she explains one experience in which Dreyfuss was trying to remake the John Deere tractor. She told about his need to test out everything in order to find out what needs to be improved. In one instance, Dreyfuss tested out a John Deere farm tractor for weeks. One day he was testing out sharp turns and nearly ran over his assistant. It was then that he realized the movement of the tractor needed to be better developed, from personal experience. In addition, he worked with Hamilton Hotels in this manner. Before making renovations, Dreyfuss traveled to the location and checked in as a customer. He stayed in the hotel room and documented what he did not like about it. Then he was able to improve conditions, such as the level of the bed, the size of the radiator, and more. If Dreyfuss found that a product was easy to use and efficient the way it was, he would turn down a company’s offer. He always believed that design should better society, not just make more variations of something that already existed. In addition to testing out objects, he spent a lot of time studying stores in progress. He liked to see which design customers chose over other designs and what led them to make such decisions. He also studied customized products from other companies to see which variation was most successful and why. He put himself in the shoes of the customer to meet demands, not just create new ones. This is a large part of what made him so successful (Johnston).

In 1955, Henry Dreyfuss published the book “Designing for People” to teach other designers the importance of working in this business. In chapter 3, Dreyfuss explains how he worked and his philosophy. When offered a job, it is important to look at the task you are given before accepting, he explains. Things that must be considered are: “Will renovating this make the product more practical?”, “Is it already as useful as possible the way it is?”, “Will it be worth the outcome to redesign it?”, “Will this fix problems that everyone faces when using it?”, “Will it be easier to sell this way?”, “Do engineers have the technology to carry out creation of a new design?” Henry Dreyfuss states in his book that there must be a working harmony between designer and manufacturer in order to redesign something successfully. One must not stand back and expect a company to understand and be able to make a drawn design into a reality; designers are required to get into the engineering, production, and advertising departments to see what is needed to be done first. Every angle of production and sale of the product must be regarded first. I think this book was a way for Dreyfuss to pass on his knowledge and experience so that future designers would continue to make improved models of objects as resources became available to them (Dreyfuss).

Dreyfuss died in 1972, but the Henry Dreyfuss Association (HDA), still exists today. The HDA was founded in 1929 when Dreyfuss began work, and it has spread into a nationwide company. In 1967, Dreyfuss renamed his work under the HDA and assigned Donald M. Genaro, James M. Conner, and Niels Diffrient as associates. He retired two years later, and passed away three years after that. Hundreds of companies have signed the HDA as their designers. The HDA has recreated thousands of items in their work. Since Dreyfuss’s death, they are most popular for the creation of Polaroid cameras, the John Deere “Gator,” the MCI’s 42 foot tour bus, John Deere backhoe designs, Kodak camera designs, and more. The premise that the HDA works on thanks to Henry Dreyfuss’s influence is based on “Human Factors.” This means that all the work they do is based on how to redesign something for improved use to benefit humans (hda.net). All models are tested by humans, and their primary concern is how it will affect the person using/inside the design. In his time, Dreyfuss created human models, based on size statistics, named "Joe" and "Josephine." In every sketch of new products, the new creation is drawn to scale to these test dummies. This way, the average persons comforts and needs are always considered first (Dreyfuss). The HDA have carried on the traditions and morals of Dreyfuss in their designs and continue to today (hda.net).

Unlike most designers, Henry Dreyfuss made a widespread change in the world of manufacturing with quality over style. He, along with other designers, is responsible for the emergence of the modernism time period in the early 1900s. He focused our view of design on function, not just aesthetics. The era in which he worked was very important to design’s time line. I think Dreyfuss holds a very solid place in the history of design because of this. He was a legend, creating hundreds of designs all for the plan of making common objects more proficient and enjoyable for the people of his society. As stated by Henry Dreyfuss:

“If the point of contact between the product and the people becomes a point of friction, then the industrial designer has failed. If, on the other hand, people are made safer, more comfortable, more eager to purchase, more efficient- or just plain happier- the designer has succeeded.” -Henry Dreyfuss (hda.net)

Henry Dreyfuss brought a new obsession to the world of design that, in my opinion, was the most beneficial to the general public so far. Now we have common objects available to us that were customized to meet our needs. There is no question that Henry Dreyfuss was an important ingredient to the design industry; I am glad to see that through the HDA, his morals and legacy can live on forever.

Works Cited

Dreyfuss, Henry S. Designing For People. St Martins Pr, 1974.

<http://books.google.com/books?id=qOsJl7hW2qUC&dq=designing+for+people+henry+dreyfuss+preview&printsec=frontcover&source=bn&hl=en&ei=3vtrSr-KHY7YsgOnhamWBQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4>

Henry Dreyfuss Associates. HDA website, 2004.<www.hda.net>

Heskett, John. Design: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press. New York: 2005,

8-23.

Alva, Johnston. "Nothing looks Right to Dreyfuss." Saturday Evening Post 220.21 (22 Nov. 1947): 20-139.
Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. University of Arizona Library, Tucson, AZ. 26 July 2009.
<http://ezproxy.library.arizona.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=19731989&site=ehost-live>