How the 1978 Cuisinart led to disability-aware universal design
The work of Universal Design founder, Marc Harrison shows us that accessible products that work for everyone are the result of observation-based research and iteration, not just a well-meaning but largely theoretical commitment to “inclusion.”
When I was learning to handle a chef’s knife like a competent home cook (as opposed to Benihana headliner,) most of the tips I received were about keeping the knife in motion while preserving my full complement of fingers. Like many domestic cooks, I have forgotten how intimidating and even dangerous kitchens can be. Within these commonplace rooms, we handle blades, measure quantities and combine ingredients in highly specific ways. And we must choreograph all our actions in the presence of an extreme heat source. Our recipes involve far more distinct steps than we imagine. Time and motion studies reveal that preparing a ‘simple’ spaghetti dinner takes no fewer than 400 different actions!
But the terrors able-bodied people experience when cooking are nothing compared to what people with disabilities face when trying to prepare food in a space designed for a very different type of human body. Writer, home cook, and disabled person, John Hockenberry explains:
“The kitchens I have known were always the scene of harrowing claustrophobic engagements among canyon-like countertops. Preparing meals involved avoiding unruly cabinets, the way forward blocked by my wheelchair. I was left to cook sauces with only a wooden spoon to guide me around a pot I couldn’t hope to see into. My most important ingredients were out of reach when I needed them. There was daily hand-to-hand combat with refrigerators and dishwashers; hot ovens were scenes of flaming grease-spattering ambushes; stoves were locales of firefights, as I attempted to move boiling stockpots from burner to sink without poaching my lap. I carry numerous physical scars from these battles.”
(Source: Design is Universal, John Hockenberry, Metropolis Magazine, December 2004)
Industrial designer and person with disability, Marc Harrison understood these challenges well. He recognized that when people with different bodies perform tasks in the same environment, their success or failure depends less on the body than the environment. He applied this insight when redesigning the Cuisinart food processor to make it more accessible to people with a wide range of physical capabilities. His process entailed watching a variety of people with a variety of physical abilities carry out the actions needed to operate it.
The Cuisinart’s success helped inspire him to organize the ambitious Universal Kitchen Project, and in turn, to found the discipline of Universal Design. The new design principle was based on the simple idea that if designers designed for a wide range of bodies and abilities, the result would be products that worked better for everyone.
Marc Harrison’s commitment to creating a kind of design that worked for people with all kinds of physical and cognitive abilities came about through hard, personal experience. One snowy New York City day in 1947 at the age of eleven, he experienced a sledding accident that left him with severe brain damage, which impaired his ability to walk, talk and do things with his hands. Thanks to effective rehabilitation programs, young Marc regained all of these functions to a greater or lesser degree. He was no doubt fortunate that his injury occurred during that brief moment in America when thousands of injured World War II veterans and their loved ones were returning to civilian life along with an even greater number of civilian polio victims — all struggling to gain back a measure of the mobility and independence they had enjoyed before. In Brooklyn, where Marc lived, services for the disabled were more available than ever before.
With time and help, the young teenager Marc learned how to move, communicate, and use a pencil again. He soon took advantage of this hard-won mobility to pursue his interest in art and design. When not at home, in physical therapy, or attending high school, he could be found, sketchbook in his hand, wandering the halls of the Brooklyn Museum or a short subway ride away in Manhattan’s Metropolitan Museum or at The Modern on East 53rd Street.
In 1954, at the age of 17, he followed his love of design to Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute and earned his bachelor’s degree in Design there in 1958. For a student like Marc whose disability had taught him the importance of designing for human bodies instead of abstract design aesthetics, the school was likely a great fit. It had been founded in 1897 to prepare a new generation of less-privileged students to design and build for a world that was industrializing faster every day and always encouraged its students to consider the real-world application and commercial potential of everything they made.
After graduation, Harrison left Brooklyn to pursue postgraduate work at Michigan’s Cranbrook Academy of Art, whose president, Finnish Architect Eliel Saarinen (father of architect and industrial designer, Eero) built a curriculum that nurtured the simple, naturalistic design style we now call “Mid-Century Modernism.” Unlike early 20th Century modernism, which often imposed stark formal geometry on everyday objects for aesthetic reasons, this softer, more organic style of product design tasked designers with understanding how people would use things in their daily lives and how the things they designed would integrate with the user’s larger environment. To foster this view, Saarinen insisted that students gain a comprehensive mastery of design disciplines, methods, and materials:
“Saarinen wanted students to be able to envision, create, and understand all aspects of design, from architecture to furniture to metalworking, and to engage in experimentation. Thus the campus and curriculum were created as a massive laboratory for the graduate students, giving them free rein to work as they pleased.”
(Source: https://cranbrookart.edu/about/history/)
This desire to design for people’s needs while considering their whole context of use would inform the rest of Marc Harrison’s design career. When Cuisinart asked him to redesign their trademark food processor, he knew that the first step in designing a usable product was understanding how people interact with it to get things done. To achieve this understanding, he needed to observe and film people doing food prep tasks with prototypes of his food processor. He and his students at Rhode Island School of Design would then analyze what happened and use their insights to streamline the product’s design. Harris didn’t invent this methodology; time and motion studies of industrial workflow had been around since the early 20th Century.
But Harrison’s way of observing and optimizing work owed little to the technique’s inventor, Winslow Taylor, who aimed to increase productivity and profits by streamlining the actions of workers on factory assembly lines than it did to the husband and wife efficiency expert team, Frank and Lilian Bunker Gilbreth. The Gilbreths used time and motion studies to optimize the tasks of everyday life and applied what they learned to raising their 12 children. Two of those children would document their oddly optimized childhoods in a funny and affectionate 1948 memoir (and later, Hollywood hit film), Cheaper by the Dozen.
Unlike “Taylorism” whose stopwatch-driven ‘efficiencies’ led to faster assembly lines and burnt-out, resentful workers, the Gilbreths believed that true efficiency came from eliminating as many steps and motions as possible from a task. Or, as Frank Gilbreth Senior was fond of saying, “I will always choose a lazy person to do a difficult job, because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.” The Gilbreths believed that by studying how people carried out tasks and reducing the number and type of things they had to do, they could make the workplace and home more efficient and the experience of doing work more satisfying.
Results of their work are apparent every day. If your kitchen floor plan includes “U” or “C-shaped” countertops with stove and refrigerator on opposite sides of each arm of the letter and the sink located between them at the character’s ‘bowl, ’ as shown in the image above, that’s no coincidence. This layout is the result of motion studies that Lilian Bunker Gilbreth conducted on homemakers in the 1920s.
What became known as the “kitchen triangle” was a takeaway that has influenced home design ever since, but in the course of her observations, Gilbreth discovered something equally important that has had far less impact: people’s bodies are different. Though her test group included only able-bodied women, she couldn’t help noting that kitchen countertops built for women of ‘average’ height made work difficult for anyone taller or shorter than that mathematical mean. To remedy this, she recommended that manufacturers should enable height adjustments to kitchen work surfaces in order to accommodate different body types. It’s a short jump from here to the idea of universal design.
While my research didn’t uncover a direct influence of Lilian Bunker Galbreth’s work on Marc Harrison, it’s safe to assume that as a designer of food preparation devices and workspaces who researched using time and motion studies — an area in which she is recognized as one of three early 20th pioneers — he would have been well aware of her influential studies on kitchen design.
One thing is certain. When Marc Harrison was tasked with redesigning the popular Cuisinart, he knew that he couldn’t just remake it without doing a lot of observation. As The Hagley Museum curator of Harrison’s document collection notes:
“Harrison redesigned the original [Cuisinart] to meet the needs of a larger range of consumers, particularly those with physical limitations. [emphasis mine] His new design featured oversized, easily pressed buttons, large graspable handles, and bold print. Harrison conducted meticulous human factors studies focusing on the operational sequences of the product’s normal use.
Harrison developed the proportions and special shape of the work bowl handle from anthropometric data. The paddle-like controls accommodated gross hand motions for people with even limited motor skills. Harrison even redesigned the shape of the plug to comfortably fit fingers.”
(Source: The DLC-X Cuisinart Food Processor, Marc Harrison Human Factors Collection, The Hagley Museum, Wilmington, DE USA)
The result was a far more usable food processor, the 1978 Cuisinart DLC-X, a restaurant kitchen-sized chopper whose design has guided every subsequent model. Its smart, motion-saving design was so influential that in the decade that followed it was featured in two different 20th Century product design shows at major U.S. museums. Cuisinart next asked him to design a line of branded cookware, including the beloved 1983 “Grand Griddle,” which still fetches high prices on Ebay today.
The recognition and success which Harrison gained with his Cuisinart DLC-X design gave him the momentum to tackle something even more ambitious. In 1993, he and his students at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) undertook the Universal Kitchen Project. As in his Cuisinart redesign, he and his students observed people with various physical capabilities carrying out common kitchen tasks and analyzed their movements. They applied what they learned in order to build a kitchen workspace whose design would minimize the number of distinct steps and difficult motions required to work in a kitchen, and in so doing, they established the theory and practice of Universal Design.
To call the designs Harrison’s team of RISD students produced “revolutionary” hardly covers the case. They merged sink, stovetop, and food prep surfaces into a seamless whole to minimize the constant shuttling between them required in the traditional kitchen. Some areas stayed constantly wet to facilitate rinsing and washing of ingredients. Grey water from the wet area nurtured a countertop mini-garden of edible greens and cooking herbs. Boiling happened in inset cooking wells while an adjustable spigot with automatic-shutoff mechanisms delivered water on-demand to pots, pans, and boiler sinks. And of course, all surfaces were adjustable to accommodate standing cooks of various heights, as well as those in wheelchairs.
Unfortunately, by the middle 1990s, Marc had been diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), or “Lou Gehrig’s Disease,” and would not live to see the project completed. The universal kitchen premiered to great acclaim at New York’s Cooper Hewitt Design Museum, shortly after his death in 1998.
The uneasy afterlife of the universal kitchen
With Marc gone, the Universal Kitchen Project lacked the engaged and visible champion needed to push so many innovations into the mainstream. The same year it was launched, RISD sold exclusive production rights to the Maytag (now Whirlpool) corporation which has emerged as a steady if a lukewarm supporter of Universal Design principles. In 2012 Whirlpool South America unveiled their prototype Liberty Project kitchen design, whose debt to RISD’s Universal Kitchen Design is self-evident.
One reason that this major appliance manufacturer has never marketed the universal kitchen’s many innovations as the suite of interlocking components that its designers envisioned may well be that its design breaks the model of kitchen design we’ve been living with for a century by integrating accessibility from the start. And in the process, it challenges the entire existing model of kitchen design which is based on built-in fixtures and a mix of large and small appliances. For a company that made its name selling large appliances, that may well be a paradigm shift too far.
The Cuisinart and its many imitators have fared better in the marketplace. Harrison’s design innovations have made their way into each successive model of the famous food processor but the About Us/History page of Cuisinart’s corporate website does not mention his contribution.
Disability activism is about removing obstacles. One obstacle in need of removal is the reluctance of major corporations to go all-in on universal design. But it doesn’t have to be this way. The ideas that drove Marc Harrison’s work on the Cuisinart and Universal Kitchen are still as valid as ever, and the need for design that is both accessible and innovative remains unchanged. With observation and iteration and thought, it’s possible to make products that are better for people with disabilities and more delightful the currently able-bodied. Harrison’s design process shows us the way. The tools and processes are there. We need only pick them up and use them.
Are we willing?
Note:
Cuisinart™ is a registered trademark of the Conair Corporation. The views expressed in this article are my own and do not reflect those of Cuisinart™ the Conair Corporation or any company or institution mentioned in this article.
Sources
Edible Rhody article on Marc Harrison
Pratt industrial design website
1977 article on the (pre-redesign) Cuisinart™
