David Carter (industrial designer)

The youngest of four brothers, David was born in Leicester, to Harry Carter, a commercial traveller, and Helen (nee Smith), his Irish wife.[2] Weeks after D-day, David left Wyggeston Grammar School for Boys aged 16 (he was a near contemporary of David Attenborough[3]) for an apprenticeship in a local engineering firm making an oddball wartime mix of long-range fuel drop tanks laminated in brown paper and fish glue for Spitfires, flexible machine-gun muzzle plugs and articulated dolls with go-to-sleep eyes.By chance, Carter’s boss was a sculptor, trained at the Slade School of Fine Art and directed by the Ministry of Labour to wartime work in aircraft production.[4] He trained at the Leicester College of Art (now DeMontfort University), simultaneously spending a good part of 2 years in an engineering works. He served in the Navy with the Fleet Air Arm as a trainee radar mechanic. His naval boarding house happened to be in Thurloe Square, South Kensington, across the road from the V&A, where the Britain Can Make It exhibition was on show. A didactic display of how and what Britain could design and make in the postwar era, it drew an audience of 1.5 million, he was captivated by Misha Black’s stand (who later became one of his mentors),[5] The Birth of an Eggcup. Behind a 13 ft plaster egg, a non-stop plastics moulding press made 3,000 egg cups every day during the exhibition’s autumn run.[6] Demobbed in 1948 he returned to full-time study in the industrial design (engineering) department of the Central School of Art and Design, a new course established under Douglas Scott.[7][8] Awarded a travel bursary by the Royal Society of Arts, Carter spent a year in Scandinavia, where he was particularly taken by the work of Danish designers Arne Jacobsen and Kay Bojesen.[9] He went on to a variety of industrial design positions and then in 1960 he set up on his own as a consultant, going on to employ a growing team of engineers, designers, model-makers and assistants as David Carter Associates.[10]

Carter was responsible for the crisp and elegant design of many everyday products, ranging from the Stanley knife, which he reconfigured with a dip in the casing to make opening the blade easier, to street furniture, electric fires, kitchen scales and pens.

He created models early in the design process. The first one for each commission would preferably be full size and made of cardboard, “just to get an idea of how big it is”, he said. The Stanley knife went through at least six cardboard iterations before he was happy with the result.

In 1970, when household telephones were supplied exclusively by the Post Office, he was commissioned to design a new rotary-dial model that would sit on a table or shelf, or be mounted on the wall. “We were asked to make this telephone cheaper to produce than the existing model,” he told The Times.

It was the process by which designs were developed and delivered that truly interested him. As a result he often assigned the intellectual property rights to his clients, rarely applying for patents himself. He insisted that this was not an act of altruism but the only practical way to ensure the efficient execution and dispatch of a design contract. “I don’t want to become an entrepreneur who just pushes designs out one after another,” he said.[11]

Simultaneously, he started teaching at the Birmingham College of Art and Design, where his head of department was the late Naum Slutzky, who had been one or Carter's teachers during his time at the Central, and whom Carter identifies as a powerful influence in his work, an industrial designer who had begun his working life as a goldsmith with the Wiener Werkstätte before joining the Bauhaus in 1919. He had left Germany for the UK when Hitler was appointed chancellor.[12][13]

Under Carter's continued leadership the David Carter Associates became DCA Design Consultants in 1975[14] and later renamed itself as DCA Design International Ltd in 1986.[15] He retired from DCA in 1992, though the company continues to trade to this day from its traditional home and headquarters on Church Street, Warwick in the UK. Also he continued to teach, setting up and leading the department of design engineering at the Royal College of Art.[16]

Carter's industrial design work has won many prizes including:

• Design Centre Award (1961) for the Orbit castors, for Joseph Gillot & Sons Ltd.
• The Prince of Wales Award for Industrial Innovation (1981–85)
• The Duke of Edinburgh Prize for Elegant Design (also known as the Prince Philip Designers Prize) for a Gas-Flo system for the Wales Gas Board (1967)[17][18][19]

Carter established himself as a renowned industrial designer, becoming a member of the Royal Society of Arts, the Design Council, the Society of Industrial Artists and Designers and the Royal College of Art.

Carter was president of the Society of Industrial Artists and Designers during 1974–75, was appointed Royal Designer for Industry in 1974,[20] from 1972 to 1984 he was deputy chairman of the Design Council[21] and was a trustee of the Conran Boilerhouse Foundation, chairman of the Design Museum and chairman of the Royal Society of Arts Design Board in 1983. He was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1980.

His family lived between a house in the Cotswolds and a coastal cottage at Tralong in County Cork.[22] He died of complications from dementia on November 16, 2020, aged 92[23].[24] He married Theo Towers in 1953, an artist who became a freelance fashion illustrator for Vogue magazine. Theo died in 2013 and Carter is survived by their children: Steven, a copywriter; Jonathan, an architect; Jane, who is marketing director of Disney in Paris, and her twin, Helen, a HR manager for the NHS.[25]

• Official website