Deconstructing Product Design

Ball Clock

Irving Harper and George Nelson Associates, 1948

1. Inspiration for great design can come from different places — necessity, opportunity, analogy, and sometimes where you least expect it. George Nelson comments: “Noguchi came by, and Bucky Fuller came by. I’d been seeing a lot of Bucky those days, and here was Irving and here was I, and Noguchi … he saw we were working on clocks and he started making doodles. Then Bucky sort of brushed Isamu aside. He said, ‘This is a good way to do a clock,’ and he made some utterly absurd thing. Everybody was taking a crack at this … pushing each other aside and making scribbles. At some point we left — we were suddenly all tired, and we’d had a little bit too much to drink — and the next morning ...