Stepping into Tom Karen’s home was like finding yourself on the set of Blade Runner, specifically the scenes featuring Sebastian, the genetic designer who also liked to make toys. There were stacks of objects, products, artworks and souvenirs, many of which he had made or designed. On the deep orange mantelpiece was a little bronze blackbird, while standing on a lounge table were three toy penguins, waiting to be set marching by the flick of a switch. In the bay window hung an angel, a witch on her broomstick and rockets bound for the skies.
“This is my special peace aeroplane,” Karen would explain, swooping to pick up a blue wooden aircraft and gliding it through the air before pressing a button to release a miniature bomb. “Don’t worry,” he would add. “It’s a peace bomb and when it lands it releases a special mist that makes everyone happy and sensible and stops them being at war.”
Karen designed countless objects, ranging from crash-test dummies to the Reliant Scimitar GTE car, as well as vehicles with names such as Bug or Robin. He also claimed to have made a crucial contribution to the iPhone after convincing Jonathan Ive, the future Apple designer, not to quit his design studies. He was even responsible for designing the Popemobile used by John Paul II on his visit to Britain in 1982 and the Landspeeder craft that Luke Skywalker drove in the Star Wars films.
Toys were the favourite of “the man who designed the 1970s”, as he was known. In pride of place stood a gleaming red Chopper bicycle, one of the defining products of the decade that he designed for Raleigh while working at the Ogle design agency. However, the Chopper’s paternity was disputed, with Alan Oakley (obituary, May 21, 2012), Raleigh’s chief international designer, also claiming credit. Karen always insisted otherwise, producing as evidence the earliest sketches and concept drawings that he had made.
Thomas Joseph Derrick Paul Kohn was born into a wealthy family in Vienna in 1926, the son of Pavel Kohn, the Jewish heir to a bricks and cement fortune, and his Christian wife, Margaret (née von Ferraris), whose father Arthur von Ferraris was a fashionable portrait artist who painted both Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and President Franklin D Roosevelt of the US. He had an older brother, Felix, who emigrated to the US, and a younger sister, Bettina, who became a nurse.
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The family home was in Brno, then in Czechoslovakia, which would be annexed by Nazi Germany in 1939. He was raised as a Catholic, though that made no difference to their country’s occupiers. “Both my parents were totally irreligious but with that name we didn’t stand a chance,” he said. Five days before his 13th birthday he was woken during the night and told to dress and grab a favourite toy. “We got in a car and drove up to Prague because there was some idea that Prague might be spared. Then of course we watched the Germans walking down Wenceslas Square,” he said.
His father used his connections with the Czech air force to flee the country. “And then some amazing people got some visas for my mother and for my brother and sister, so we got to Belgium and then went to the south of France,” he said. Overcoming bureaucratic obstacles they travelled on via Spain to Portugal and then sailed from Lisbon to Bristol. Taking a train to London, they tracked down his father to a friend’s apartment in a Maida Vale mansion block.
In autumn 1942 young Tom was dispatched to study aeronautical engineering at Loughborough College of Technology (now Loughborough University), in Leicestershire, where he was captain of the Barrow Hall swimming team. Once hostilities were over in 1945, the rest of the family returned to Brno to try to recover some of their property, but their industrial holdings were nationalised.
Alone in England, Tom used his Loughborough diploma to find work at Hunting Percival, the aircraft manufacturer, in Luton. So began the most barren years of his life. “The job, in the stressing office, entailed calculating the robustness of aircraft structures. I was useless at it,” he wrote.
With no family and no friends, he fell into a depression. He tried playing football, but broke his leg and grew even more isolated. He caught pneumonia, then colitis. Offered occupational therapy in hospital he chose basketwork and after being discharged started taking evening classes in art, graphic design and life drawing. “They weren’t the world’s greatest classes, but they helped remove a block from my mind,” he wrote.
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At about that time, in early 1948, he anglicised his surname to Karen and became a British citizen. “I don’t suppose this attempt at personal rebranding made the slightest practical difference,” he said. “I had only to open my mouth for people to realise that I was not English-born. But it did boost my confidence.”
He now began drawing aviation-themed cartoons, sending them to an aircraft magazine. Shortly afterwards he successfully applied for a technical illustrator’s post at the Air Registration Board, which oversaw aircraft safety, at Croydon airport. There his tennis improved and he became adept at assembling his own cars.
A “dollop of unexpected good fortune” came in 1954 when a distant relative who was a lawyer secured compensation for the family’s lost assets in Brno and for a time he could afford to live without an income. Determined to become an industrial designer, he turned up unannounced at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London. “For some reason they admitted me . . . I had missed the beginning of the academic year, but nobody seemed bothered,” he recalled.
Here he was exposed to all the right tutors: Douglas Scott, who designed the Routemaster and the Aga cooker; and William Johnstone, the principal, who showed great enthusiasm for his model toaster.
A visitor from the Ford motor company offered him a post at Dagenham with drawing boards, storage space and an onsite model shop that could turn his designs into prototypes.
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At first he worked on car exteriors, later graduating to instruments and dashboards. Though little of his work made it into finished car designs, there were small successes such as the badge for the front of the Ford Anglia 105E.
Yet Dagenham was a bleak place to live and by the mid-1950s Karen felt more at ease among fellow exiles in London and got to know Nicole Lagesse from Mauritius. “We got on quite well: we could both speak French, and sometimes we did so to one another,” he recalled.
However, his dilatory approach to romance tried her patience and in the summer of 1959 she left for Mauritius. With ambivalence giving way to longing, he joined her and they were married there, informing his family only upon their return.
Meanwhile, he had left Ford for David Ogle Associates, a design consultancy where life moved at a quicker pace. “I worked on a cooker, a boat, a bicycle, a bath, an electric heater,” he wrote. “It was hard to get bored, with so many things to think about.” In contrast to Ford, most of his designs were used.
He moved on to Hotpoint (washing machines) and Philips (ice-cube holders for fridges) but was lured back to Ogle after its founder’s death. There he was responsible for designing the Bush TR130 radio, the bestselling radio of the late 1960s in the UK, putting a pair of large wheels on the back of Electrolux vacuum cleaners and imagining how cars of the future might look.
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In 1984 he was appointed chairman, a move that meant repressing his more creative instincts. “In one of my sketchbooks from this period, pages of careful designs for aircraft interiors are suddenly interrupted by a drawing of a monkey in business clothing, holding a mobile phone. I think I was trying to tell myself something,” he recalled.
His marriage was dissolved in 1994 and he is survived by his children: Nicolas, a warehouse operative; Josephine, a textile designer; Max, a hydrogeologist in Zambia; and Eugenie, a paper conservator at Manchester central library. They were all sources of inspiration: he designed a baby walker to help one learn to walk and the Marble Run game for another. Both products became international bestsellers.
Later he moved to a small Victorian terraced house in Cambridge, turning a decaying garage at the end of the garden into a workshop and building a new circle of friends. Yet even in retirement he was “constantly making a nuisance of myself with the toy industry”, sending manufacturers ideas for how they could improve his grandchildren’s toys.
As with most designers, some of Karen’s projects never quite took off, such as the Aircruiser II. “There’s a completely new wing configuration and a wide horizontal fuselage to make flying more spacious and comfortable,” he enthused. Then there was his plan for a circular floating city, a kind of 21st-century Noah’s Ark.
As for which creation was his favourite, the answer was always the same: “My next one.”
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Tom Karen OBE, industrial designer, was born on March 20, 1926. He died on December 31, 2022, aged 96