Carroll Gantz,
FIDSA (b. 1931)
President of the Industrial Designers Society of America
(IDSA), 1979-1980
US industrial designer born 1931 in Sellersville, Pennsylvania. Received a BFA in Industrial Design, from Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in 1953. Served in US Army with the National Security Agency as a cryptanalyst from 1953 to 1956. He became designer and later industrial design manager for the Hoover Company in North Canton, Ohio from 1956 to 1972, before he joined Black & Decker US Power Tools in Towson, Maryland as Manager of Industrial Design. In 1980, he headed industrial design for a new B&D Household Products Division in Easton, Maryland, and in 1984, after B&D acquired GE's Small Appliance Division in Bridgeport, Connecticut, became Director of Design for the new combined B&D Housewares Group in Shelton, Connecticut until 1986. He organized about 25 B&D designers around the world and established corporate design standards.
From 1987 through 1992, he became Professor and Head of the Design Department of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he established a unique multidisciplinary design course for engineering, marketing and design students. He also established a consulting business, Carroll Gantz Design. Gantz is a frequent lecturer and author of numerous design history articles and is listed in Who's Who in America.
Gantz holds 30 US design and utility patents. He invented/designed many well-known consumer products including Hoover's 2100 Portable Cleaner (1964), their Dialamatic upright vacuum cleaner (1966) and B&D's cordless Dustbuster hand-held vacuum cleaner (1978), with sales of over 100 million units by 2000. He is a recipient of national design recognition from the Industrial Designers Institute (IDI) in 1964 and from the Industrial Design Excellence Awards (IDEA) in 1993.
Gantz became a member of The American Society of Industrial Design (ASID) in 1961, which became IDSA in 1965. In 1974 he became a Fellow of IDSA. He was President and Board Chairman from 1979 through 1982 and was awarded IDSA's distinguished Personal Recognition Award in 1986. He retired to Seabrook Island, South Carolina in 1997, where he continued to serve IDSA as Chair of the Design History Section.