Brian Sear (1932-2020)
The Australian industrial designer, Brian Sear, played a major role in the design of electronic consumer goods at Kriesler, a profitable Australian subsidiary of the Dutch corporation, Phillips. Born in Molong NSW, he began his career with a 1948 apprenticeship with the office of the architect M.V.E. Woodforde in his George Street studio, Sydney.
This designer-to-be spent two and one-half years with Woodforde while completing his leaving certificate at Sydney Technical College. During his studies, he read books by the American industrial designers Walter Dorian Teague and Raymond Loewy and began to look at industrial design rather than architecture.
Rather than enter the industrial design course (est.1949) at the Melbourne Technical College, Brian chose the UK and gained admission at Leicester College of Art sailing for Europe in January 1956. Although intent on Leicester, the Council of Industrial Design (COID), London, persuaded him to switch to a new course launching at the Royal College of Art (RCA) in 1957.
The RCA’s first industrial design teachers were the head teacher F.C. Ashford and the Russian expatriate Naum Slutsky (1894-1965) (1). Ashford commented in an interview in 1956 that “nowhere else in Europe will there be a course [on] offer quite like ours.”
Brian Sear’s savings held out for two years of study at the RCA and now penniless, he decided to take the RCA diploma. In 1959, Sear re-emerged in Stockholm to study at Stockholm’s new “Konstfack” school (The official name of the school is Konstfackskolan, Stockholm) where a number of design options were on offer. He could study free in Sweden, but the programme specified that could not take employment. After his second year, however, Sear was awarded a Swedish scholarship and allowed to work until he completed the degree.
The designer returned to the UK after completing the Stockholm programme and took interim industrial design work (notably the silversmith Robert Welch for projects for J & J Wiggin) before returning to Australia in late 1963 and taking an industrial design position with Kriesler Australia working under Harry Widmer (1926-2002) (2). When Widmer left the firm around 1966, Brian inherited his role and became Kriesler’s design team leader. By the 1970s, according to Sear, the company’s design and marketing had led Kriesler to generous profits but market forces and the 1970s tariff reforms began to drain the industry’s profit margins.
By 1978, Sear had left Kriesler to found his own design firm, “Bits”, with designs in the IKEA style of flat-pack furniture for the childrens’ market segment. He maintained a retail outlet in the Westfield Centre, Parramatta until “Big Box” competitors such as IKEA overran his market.
Sear, imagining that the “Golden Era” of Australian industrial design was over, returned to architecture after 1982 providing an architecture and graphic corporate identify for the financial giant Australian Guarantee Corporation (AGC) Westpac. When AGC and Westpac separated in 1987, their corporate design section closed and the designer opted for retirement at the age of 55. Brian Sear lived in a small town south of Sydney and maintained an active career in drawing and persistently enters the annual Dobell Prize for Drawing at the Art Gallery of NSW.
[This edition of the biographical summary was amended, corrected and supplemented by the designer’s son, Tom Sear in 2022]
1: Naum Slutsky was a notable metalsmith and jeweller.
2: Widmer was an award-winning industrial designer but the dynamic character left the field to pursue music and theatre interests. Harry Widmer obituary, Sydney Morning Herald, 14 May 2002.
ends/
28 April 2011, 2022
- Writers:
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- Date written:
- 2012
- Last updated:
- 2022
