by Heather Livingston
Contributing Editor

Summary: Dan Ferrara is the founder of Ferrara Design Inc., a full service industrial design firm with a client list that includes IBM, DeWalt, Johnson and Johnson, Pitney Bowes, Bic, Cuisinart, and Olivetti. Together with daughter Mia Ferrara Pelosi, Ferrara also designed Global Village Shelters (GVS), a 67-square-foot disaster relief shelter made of corrugated cardboard with a plastic coating. The $550 GVS was designed to be set up by one person without any tools and last for 18 months. Also an inventor, Ferrara holds more than 70 patents.

Education: A three-year course in industrial design at Parsons School of Design. There was no degree in industrial design when I went there.

Hobbies: I have a lot of them. I do a lot of woodworking. I make Adirondack-type furniture and regular furniture. I make archery bows and arrows. I paint wildlife, do wildlife sculpture. I build stone walls. I have about 30 things that I do. Design is part of my life, so I’m always designing something.

Path to industrial design: I just heard about it and took a summer course in New York. I’ve loved it since that time. It was the right thing for me. I went to college for a couple of years to be a lawyer or something like that, but decided that was not for me so I found this and it really clicked. It changed my life.

First job: I’ve never worked for anyone. I’ve always been independent and worked for myself. I’ve done freelance work and things like that. I did a lot of work with Raymond Loewy and his firm in New York City, but I’ve basically always had my own work. A lot of my business is what we develop here. We create and then go out and find companies to make these things. I develop projects for clients also, but a lot of our business is self-generated.

First invention: I think the first one I did in school was a device to connect concrete reinforcing rods on large buildings. When they put these things together, they had guys wrapping wire with pliers on concrete reinforcing rods. It was a little weird. I designed a tool [for tying rebar] that fit onto a drill. You take a U-shaped piece of wire, put it around the bar and into the drill, and set the torque. It would then twist it up really tight. That was probably my first patent, too. It never went into production, though. Lack of marketing and so forth, but it was a good experience because I was able to go into shops and see how something would be made: machining, tooling it up, that kind of thing. It did work, but I think what killed it was that the unions didn’t want to make it easier. They didn’t want to change the way they were doing it, especially back then. I learned a lot from it though, so it was a good project.

First large project: I designed a new way to manufacture and bake bread. I used to bake a lot of bread. You take some flour and water and move it around with your fingers and you have dough. I figured that if you can create something that does that at a very fast rate, you could use less energy and make better dough. So, I designed this machinery and set up a factory in New York. It was sold several times, but they didn’t go forward with the actual production because it was too expensive to change everything. It’s still ahead of its time today. I’m actually trying to revitalize this project to use in third world countries where we could set this up in three containers. They could put wheat in one end and get bread out the other end, and this thing is very small relative to the way they do it today. The mixing apparatus is about three inches in diameter and 14 inches long and it makes 2,500 pounds of dough an hour. You could feed 20,000 people in a day with that much material. That’s one of the projects we’re trying to spearhead to go along with the Global Village Shelters and that whole market of different countries that need a lot of food and shelter and water.

Inspiration for Global Village Shelters: Well, I thought there was a great need for that. I thought it could be a business opportunity as well as an opportunity to help make things better for people through design. I had this concept and picked this solution. I first picked the manufacturing process that way we could make these things very fast, strong, and relatively inexpensive. The corrugated industry is one where you can make things relatively fast. There aren’t a lot of tooling costs and up-front money needed.

Usually, before I go out into the market and look for partners, I try to do it myself first to make sure it feels like it works right. I made a prototype here at our place and the minute I walked in it, I thought, “Wow. This thing is great.” I spend a lot of time in the outdoors camping, and this thing was not like a tent. It was like a real room. It felt very secure and nice. I figured it could be really successful, so we started designing it. We got a design going and made models, and we partnered up with Weyerhaeuser. We made maybe 150 of them in a couple of runs. We gave them away, but we were learning about this process and refining the coating to keep it waterproof and fire resistant and refining all the other parts to make it set up better and easier to manufacture. Finally, we made 1,000 of them and 500 went to Pakistan.

Now we’ve designed another one that’s larger. That one is about 6.5 square meters and the new one is about 21 square meters. It’s much bigger and it’s made out of recycled plastic, so we’re working on different materials. We’re also working on a third one that’s going to be more of a modular design using the corrugated material, but with a new process that encapsulates that inside the plastic envelope, which is really great. It makes it very strong.

There are other markets too, like corporations that do large projects all over the world that have to build facilities for their workers. We’ve seen interest there, and governments, but we haven’t really pushed hard on any of these fields. We’re just trying to get organizations like CARE and UN interested in putting these things around the world to inventory them up front so they can actually have something right away. That’s always the problem. They wait until the disaster happens, and then they don’t have anything ready, but these can be ready pretty fast. We’ve done some studies and believe that, if we set up enough people, we can make original GVS in our factories out west and in Mexico. It’s designed to be made fast and to react to different situations.

Inspiration: I get inspired by need or a problem to solve. I do a lot of reading. That’s probably the most important thing—to know what’s going on in different areas and be able to apply and solve things in a different way. I think it’s an exciting world out there. Design is in many different things and it’s exciting as far as solving these problems. It’s part of my life to look at something and figure out how I can do it better, fix it, or improve it.

On sustainability: Architecture is an interesting and exciting area. It’s challenging from a sustainability standpoint and making everything work with the least amount of energy. That’s exciting. There’s a little bit of hype going on with it, but there’s also a huge need for it. Things in the world have a tendency to go in circles and come back to themselves. If you think back in time to when you had the old farmhouse in New England when the country first started, they took care of everything in that farmhouse. It was basically self sustaining with the heat from the fire and the food they grew. They had a way of creating everything they needed. Then came electricity, which was a huge breakthrough for everybody. They started to make electricity in a central location and distribute it, and that has now grown to be a huge mess that costs a lot of money. The distribution costs so much money and wastes a lot of energy in the process. I had this thought probably 30 years ago that the utilities could rent something that has a fuel cell in it and a communications interface and you would create your own heat, electricity, and fresh water. They would put it into a residence rather than distribute everything. It’s coming, but it probably won’t be for another 30 years.

Biggest challenge for an industrial designer: I think the most challenging thing is defining the problem correctly. Once you know what the problem is, the solution is much easier to reach. If you don’t really know what the problem is, how the things are used, and all the background to what you’re doing, then the solution is not responsive to it.

Proudest achievement: I designed the first laptop computer, for Olivetti, but I never did much publicity or anything. I think that some other people may claim that, but definitely we did the first one. I designed it to fit in half your briefcase and put the display in the cover.

I also did the new air traffic control system for IBM and Raytheon. We were actually instrumental in getting IBM the contract of $3.9 billion. I think we spent three and a half years doing pre-contract work, and most of the work the FAA looked at was work that we did here in our model shop. We did all the hardware design, the consoles, and all the tower equipment. That was a big job. It took seven years after that to finish it, then another six years before they installed it. Now it’s all over the country in every airport.

Next challenge for the world: I think people are tending not to want all this stuff—too many useless items like a carrier for a water bottle or wine bottle. People are getting sick of too many things. I think people are focusing now on what they really use and what’s valuable to them in their everyday life. Environmentally, I think we really have to work to produce less stuff because everything you produce—I don’t care what it is, from a pair of jeans to a toothbrush to a piece of furniture—it all takes energy and materials and it adds up. It all makes smoke and dust and fumes and it needs to be toned down.

People don’t realize when they look at a room that everything in that room, however insignificant it seems, took a lot of technology to make. We do a lot of work for Bic. We’ve done hundreds of pens, and people don’t realize that to make a ballpoint pen, there’s so much technology: how the ball is made, how it fits in, how it doesn’t clog, and how the ink is made to flow through. There’s chemistry involved in that: how the plastics are made, how they developed over time, how to make a mold with a hundred cavities in it, and how you balance the mold. It’s huge technology, but people don’t realize that. Probably they never will. They’re more focused on what they have in their hand.

I guess it all boils down to education. They don’t teach children any of that stuff in school. If they brought students to a pencil factory, which seems relatively simple but isn’t, they would start to appreciate how things are made and what it takes to make everything. How we make things today is pretty much a disaster. I think we need to have a more responsible and less frivolous outlook on things that people need. I’m not saying that they can’t have some things that are just exciting to have, but it’s gotten to be too much. I think that’s the next big challenge.