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What can 6,000 pencil sharpeners reveal about the objects we barely notice? A University of Northern Iowa archive describes retired biology and ecology professor Paul D. Whitson’s collection as spanning Civil War-era examples and later designs shaped by popular culture. After retiring, he researched the sharpeners’ patents, inventors, materials and production methods. Those details offer a way to see a familiar desk tool as a series of design choices, rather than a single unchanging object.
The archive includes photographs of about 200 items from the larger collection. It also describes how graphic design students used photographs of roughly that many sharpeners for a 2015 poster assignment. That is a curious second life for the collection: objects made to sharpen pencils became subjects for students designing with them. But what determined which sharpeners were photographed from the thousands Whitson collected?
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- Which patent histories did Whitson document? : Still exploring
- How were the roughly 200 photographed artifacts selected? : Still exploring
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