Obituary: Rick Dickinson, industrial designer of the ZX Spectrum
It's probably fitting that Rick Dickinson's interest in design was first kindled by Lego. Speaking to Edge magazine in 2004, the industrial designer behind Sinclair's iconic 1980s home computers, who died of cancer earlier this week, explained how toddler ambitions to be a train driver and a lorry driver were put aside when he discovered those colourful blocks with their magical clutch power. "Lego had [just] launched their brick system, in Denmark and Germany," he explained. "And since part of my family was German I used to play with Lego all the time." Building Lego bridges gave way to building Lego spaceships; the fledgling designer was already learning practical skills that would become absolutely crucial later on. "I built things out of Lego," he remembered, "but with it being a square brick format you had to be incredibly inventive and imaginative."
Lego led to an interest in architecture and then to a career in industrial design, first in-house working for Sir Clive Sinclair and eventually running his own consultancy firm, Dickinson Associates, in Cambridge. Legendary commissions and plenty of awards followed, but some of Dickinson's first projects - the design of the Sinclair ZX81 and its follow-up, the ZX Spectrum - remain his greatest legacy. These glorious personal computers, surprisingly compact and pleasant on the eye and in the hands, matched with a price point so low that it seemed, at the time, to be almost a work of magic, became a defining part of the most charismatic background clutter of 1980s Britain - a time and a place not short on pop culture clutter in general. They are a reminder, too, of the strange kind of fame that an industrial designer gets to enjoy. These people make objects that help bring our lives into focus, but they retain a blissful personal anonymity at the same time. How many children rushing home from school to fire up the Speccy - much like Dickinson had once rushed home to upend his Lego bricks all over the living room - might have passed the machine's co-creator in the street without noticing?
It was hard for someone like Dickinson to remain anonymous, however. In the same Edge interview he emerges as wonderful company: knowledgeable, fiercely engaged and gloriously opinionated. Offering thoughts on everything from the design of Commodore 64 - "Big, bulky.... No innovation.... Can I swear...?" - to the original Xbox, which he deemed "interesting" - "You're probably thinking, 'This guy's a weirdo,' but yeah, there are things I like about it" - he retained, more than anything, a supremely youthful intelligence, witty and honest and offering unexpected takes on things.
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