The first New Zealander to be made a Fellow of IDSA was Joseph Sinel, FIDSA, in 1965. Sinel worked in California and was reportedly the first person to set up a consultancy using the words Industrial Designer. In 2022, the Society is proud to invite another industrial design pioneer from New Zealand to join the Academy of Fellows.
For nearly 50 years, Peter Haythornthwaite has shared about the value of industrial design and design-led enterprise on an international scale. An IDSA member since 1978, Haythornthwaite is known for raising the bar of design excellence and bringing creative thinking to disciplines across the United States, Australia, and his home country of New Zealand.
He began his design studies in 1962 at the Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland. In 1965, a design educator from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Edward J. Zagorski, FIDSA, came to Elam as a Fulbright Scholar. Zagorski inspired Haythornthwaite to pursue a master’s in industrial design at the University of Illinois. After three years in Illinois, Haythornthwaite worked in California. Then, Niels Different, FIDSA, hired him to work at Henry Dreyfuss Associates (HDA), led by Henry Dreyfuss, FIDSA, in New York City.
In 1971, Haythornthwaite returned to New Zealand to teach at the University of Auckland while maintaining a private practice. By the late 1970s, he joined Charles W. Pelly, FIDSA, at DesignworksUSA in California; and by 1984, he formed Peter Haythornthwaite Design, a multidisciplinary design consultancy. He also channeled his passion for design education into serving as head of design at the University of Auckland and as an adjunct professor of design at Victoria University in Wellington, supporting students’ academic and early career successes.
“Along with being a wonderful human being, I have never met anyone who was so dedicated to our profession,” says Raymond Carter, IDSA, of Haythornthwaite, a colleague at both HDA and DesignworksUSA. “His talent and joyful personality helped make our working environment a great place to be.”
Haythornthwaite’s inventive designs include the ar’ti-fakt-s line of office desk accessories, of which the Saturn Disc tape dispenser was a best-seller at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMa) shop in 1988. The LOMAK (Light Operated Mouse and Keyboard system), designed with two of Haythornthwaite’s sons, was the first New Zealand product in MoMA's permanent collection. The LOMAK also won Gold at the International Design Excellence Awards (IDEA) in 2007.
“Peter contributed to a global Industrial Design explosion that is seldom seen in a single person’s work," says Pelly, “and he is admired by all who have had the pleasure of knowing him."
Haythornthwaite has generously invited IDSA associates to inform New Zealand businesses and government about the value of design, including when he was twice elected President of the Designers Institute of New Zealand (DINZ). An early proponent of design thinking, he co-established Equip Design Integration Consultants, which conceived and delivered the New Zealand government’s “Better by Design” program and the State of Victoria’s “Design to Business” initiative.
Michael Smythe, author of Design Generation: How Peter Haythornthwaite shaped New Zealand’s design-led enterprise (2018), notes that as early as 1981, Haythornthwaite was telling business delegates at a New Zealand Industrial Design Council conference that design needed to be repositioned from a discretionary add-on to the center of corporate culture.
As Smythe writes in the book, “Peter’s legacy includes a New Zealand design profession migrating from the back room to enlighten the board room—with many businesses transformed from product pushers to creators of continuously enhanced value.”
Haythornthwaite has received the 2003 John Britten Award from DINZ and a 2016 Royal Honour, "Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit,” for services to design, among many other accolades. And now, he is deservedly an IDSA Fellow.
