This month marks a year that the whole world was hit by the horrible pandemic caused by the Covid-19 virus. We all changed, probably forever, many of our habits and introduced many others. We cannot, for example, leave home without remembering to get our face covering mas! It has become our faithful companion during the past 12 months and a specific kind is nowadays very familiar to us all: the N-95 mask. Have you ever stopped and think who designed this life saver tool? Let me help you with that by telling you the story of another great New Yorker, Sara Little Turnbull.
Sara Finkelstein (this her birth name) was born on September 21, 1917, in Manhattan, New York to Russian immigrant parents struggling to make a new life in Brooklyn. It was Sara’s mother who introduced her to design by finding it in everyday objects. For example it could be found in the food scraps that her mom negotiated from the corner grocer to feed her hungry children; the perfect shape of an egg, the translucent rings of an onion, or the contrasting colors of vegetables were used to artfully arrange a bowl. From an early age Sara was used to always ask, “Why?” and it was this constant questioning of the status quo that shaped her choices about how she lived her life. She was a child actress in the Yiddish Theater, and in high school, she received early distinction in design, winning an award for textile design. She attended Parsons School of Design on scholarships, graduating in 1939 with a degree in Advertising Design, that launched one of our country’s most stunning careers in design, business, and education often referred to as “corporate America’s secret weapon”. She was very small and probably easy to go unnoticed, but she made sure that did not happen. She embraced her 4’11” height, by adopting the nickname people gave her, “Little Sara” and changing it in her brand name “Sara Little”. She also selected the asterisk as her symbol, saying: “I’m the something extra. I’m the catalyst.” The right attitude you need to make it in a tough work place like the advertising design agencies dominated by men during the 50s !
Just after leaving college, Sara Little worked at Marshall Fields as a bench designer and assistant art director, then became art director at Blaker Advertising Agency. She was eventually hired as an editorial assistant at House Beautiful magazine, where she wrote the “Girl with a Future” that helped her reach the position of Decorating Editor, which she held for nearly two decades. At House Beautiful, helped develop the American post-World War II domestic lifestyle. Sara asked herself , “How can we help these people put their lives back together through ideas in our magazine?”. She suggested the readers to utilize more informal space in the home (in what eventually became known as the family room), and encourage young women to share their apartment space with roommates so that they could lead a more independent work life, also showing how to organize small spaces for maximum domestic efficiency. Sara herself lived for 20 years in a 400-square-foot (37 m2) hotel room from which she also ran her international consulting practice founded in 1958, Sara Little Design Consultant.
All this caught the attention of a giant at the time, the 3M company ,which hired Sara in their gift wrap and fabric division where she was exposed to Shapeen, a non-woven material made of polymers and used for decorative ribbons. Turnbull was fascinated by the molded version of Shapeen and invented the first pre-made bows for gift wrap.This material, so malleable and resistant triggered her creativity so she assembled an audience of 3M executives (all men naturally) to present a number of ideas she had for products (more than 100 in all) using the material. She titled this presentation “Why ?” and needless to say she impressed enormously the executives, who decided to start right away on one of those designs: a molded bra cup. This revolutionary bra was meant to be softer, more comfortable and non constrictive like the other undergarment available at the time. The patent was drawn in 1959 and accepted in 1962. During the time of the molded cup bra design, Sara was taking care of three family members who were under the care of doctors and she was often in a medical setting where she noticed that health care workers were constantly adjusting thin masks that tied in the back. She returned to 3M with the idea of using that same molded material to make a mask that would fit more comfortably on the face. She thought, in fact that her new design could allow some more breathing room for the doctors. 3M was thrilled and by 1961, they introduced a non-woven lightweight medical mask based on her concept, with elastic bands instead of strings, an aluminum nose clip and a form-fitting “bubble” shape.Unfortunately the mask couldn’t block pathogens for medical use and was marketed for dust filtration instead. Then in 1972 an improved respirator was added to the design and it could be used for other industrial purposes. As the mask’s filtration evolved, so did its usefulness. In 1995, the N95 respirator was introduced in the health care field, fulfilling Sara’s original ambition ( 95 stands for the percentage of airborne particles the mask can block). She lived to see her mask being used during the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, but she would be enormously proud to see the worldwide use it has nowadays and all the lives that it’s protecting.
This is how her mind worked. She saw a molded cup bra and connected it with a possible medical mask design…her inspiration came from everywhere, most of all from the different cultures and the natural world. She was a self-trained cultural anthropologist and frequently traveled to Borneo, Malaysia, the Philippines, India, and Kenya, always on the lookout for how people and animals solved the problems of everyday living.“It always starts with a fundamental curiosity” she used to say.
During her 65-year design career she provided advice on strategic design, consumer awareness, and cultural change to international companies such as: Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola, General Mills, Macy’s, Neiman Marcus, Marks & Spencer, American Can, DuPont, Ford, Nissan, Pfizer, Revlon, Elizabeth Arden, Lever Brothers, Motorola, NASA and Volvo. Sara Little Turnbull passed in 2015, and in her honor an educational, non-profit called the Sara Little Turnbull Center for Design Institute was created with her tangible collections and a charitable mission to educate the public about design.
