Designing for Dignity with Allen Samuels

To Emeritus Stamps Professor and Dean Allen Samuels, the world is full of opportunities to make a big difference through small interventions. Scanning a workshop full of cutout models and design prototypes housed in a studio on Ann Arbor’s west side, Samuels speaks gently and with passion about the potential to improve, and even save, lives with something as simple as a well-placed sticker or a retractable cardboard sleeping mat. As he pulls out prototypes of collapsible cribs and lighted walking canes, he notes how inexpensive each might be to manufacture — and simple to implement.

Since retiring as professor of art and design and dean of Stamps in 2008, Samuels has developed hundreds of product designs, mostly with the aim of solving a problem he learns about from reading or watching the news. Pedestrian traffic accidents. Infant mortality. Falls for the elderly and more. Once he has an idea and does some basic research, he’s ​“off and running.”

“It’s just interesting work. I like the work. I always have. That’s why I’ve been doing it for almost 60 years,” he says. ​“And I’m not going to stop until I can’t run the saw anymore. It keeps me alive.”

At 82, and with a satisfying career in teaching and designing for major clients including Corning, Bausch and Lomb, Black and Decker, Westinghouse, Owens-Illinois and 3M behind him, Samuels is less interested in hitting on the next big thing or launching a new company than he is in preventing tragedies and helping people live with dignity.

“I don’t want the meetings anymore. I don’t want the suits. I don’t want all that. I had it for 40 plus years,” Samuels says. ​“What I do now is, I work on projects that, frankly, [others] never wanted to work on. Disasters, the disabled, aging, poverty.”

Although many of his designs are intentionally simple and cost effective, a more ambitious project features a programmable mobile bathroom that could be called to a patient’s bedside by voice command or using an app on a smartphone. Samuels got the idea after learning that dementia patients can be startled by moving from dark spaces into brightly lit bathrooms in the middle of the night.

“Patients could do what they need to with dignity and limited disruption,” he says.

Working with a portable restroom manufacturer, Samuels developed a prototype that eventually won a prestigious Red Dot design award and U.S. patent before the project stalled due to complexities working within the health care system.

For another project, Samuels partnered with a UM School of Social Work graduate working with low-income mothers to develop a low-cost, cardboard cradle to help prevent infant deaths due to being smothered in bed while sleeping with their parents. Working with a box company, Samuels says they were about to take the project online when lawyers thought better of it.

The same end came to his design for a sticker to remind new parents not to leave their young children in the backseat of a hot car before going into a store. He’s reached out to insurance companies and automakers, and no one will make them. Samuels suspects it’s for fear of admitting fault.

“I guess the bottom line is I look for trouble,” Samuels said. ​“I look for these problems and then I try to solve them.”

After years of rejections, many due to unwanted legal liability, Samuels is humbly self-deprecating yet undeterred about his mission and spends several hours each week working in his studio, driven by ​“the excitement of going through the design process and coming up with something that hasn’t been yet,” whether that’s building model playscapes for children with disabilities or lighted emergency flotation devices for use at night.

Samuels’ drive to design started as a child in Chicago, where his grandfather would bring him old clocks to disassemble during family gatherings.

“When I was a kid, I would make things in my room that would make my mother go crazy,” he says. ​“I had clay on the wall and string hanging from it and all that stuff.”

Later in college at the University of Illinois, he discovered the Industrial Design program — ​“It was in the art school, but it wasn’t art and it wasn’t engineering,” he says. ​“It was this. It was what’s in between, and how do you conceptualize?” — where he fell in love with the design process and also academia.

Over the course of his career, he designed glassware, dinnerware, microscopes, scientific instruments, public transportation, heavy industrial equipment, furniture and more. While working with 3M, he developed numerous devices to support open-heart surgery and the exploration of artificial lungs. And the microscopes he designed for Bausch & Lomb continue to be used by students in classrooms and museums today.

One earlier intervention in the spirit of his recent work did make it production: a stackable set of ergonomic drinking glasses made with a ridge around the middle for easier gripping by older people with arthritis or young children. A red line around the cup makes it easier to see when full of clear liquid or milk when resting on a white countertop.

Although sales weren’t strong, seeing his young son at the time grasp the cup was enough for Samuels.

“I used to watch him drink milk out of it, because he could grasp it with little hands,” he says. ​“So I know it worked.”

As a designer working with nearly 30 corporations, and as professor, Samuels says his goal was to ​“jolt” his colleagues and students into thinking beyond the practical, nuts-and-bolts side of product design and engineering.

“Students are smart. But I’d say to them, ​‘All right. One more iteration. Take it from ordinary to extraordinary. You did a great job. The next phase would be beyond belief.”

With no signs of stopping soon, it seems he’s still following his own mantra today.