US industrial designer who graduated from of the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1964 with a Bachelor of Arts, Design, and received the Outstanding Senior Award. In 1966, he earned a Master of Arts degree from the University of California through study at the Folkwangschüle für Gestaltung, Essen, Germany.
Early in his career he worked for Henry Dreyfuss Associates in New York, working on tractors, lift trucks and cranes. He then worked for eight years as an industrial designer at Westinghouse Electric Corporation in Pittsburgh. There, he designed the car envelope and interior of an automated rubber-tired vehicle system for airports. He also worked on street lights, sleep environments, kitchen appliances, radios, irons and personal care products.
Cunnigham then joined Bally Design in Pittsburgh as vice president, and contributed to the design of industrial and medical products, including human factors standards for infant incubators, and controls for kidney dialysis machines and anesthesia equipment.
In 1979, he established his own firm, Daedalus Design, in Pittsburgh. There, he directed design on a new people mover vehicle; a portable gas analyzer, a spray gun for commercial paint lines, a battery-operated toy car, a furniture showroom in the Chicago merchandise Mart and directional signs for the Pittsburgh subway, among many other projects.
In addition to his consulting practice, Cunningham taught in the industrial design program at Carnegie Mellon University as an adjunct professor, teaching courses in the history and theory of design, rendering and presentation, production methods and product design. He also taught as an associate professor of design at The Ohio State University, and was a guest lecturer at Purdue University.
A long-time member of IDSA, Cunningham served on our Board of Directors and as a regional Vice President. In 1980, he received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for the study of design history, and has written articles on the subject. In 1987, he was an invited speaker at the First International design Interaction in Taipai, Taiwan. He is also a member of the Human Factors Society, and completed course work in this discipline at the University of Michigan.
In 1998, Daedelus won a silver Industrial Design Excellence Award from IDSA for its design of the DynaMyte, an attractive portable augmentative communicator electronic device for individuals with speech problems produced by Dynavox Systems, Inc. The product was featured in the May 1998 issue of BusinessWeek magazine. Another recent design was the AccuDose-Rx, a central pharmacy bar-code unit for medication control and administration used in over 100 hospitals and produced by McKesson Automated Healthcare.
