The immigrant designer conjured futuristic delight with icons from the Raleigh Chopper to the Reliant Robin
If you grew up in 1970s Britain, you lived in Tom Karen’s world. If you were a child, you may have played with Karen’s ingenious Marble Run toy, which is still in production today. If you weren’t cruising the streets on a Raleigh Chopper, you envied the kid who was. And you were waiting for the day they invented a levitating landspeeder like Luke Skywalker’s in Star Wars (and possibly still are). If you were slightly older, you might have driven in a sleek new Scimitar GTE, like Princess Anne did. Or, if you were a little harder up, maybe a three-wheeled Reliant Robin. Karen, who has died aged 96, had a hand in all of these and many more products.
That so many of Karen’s designs speak of their era is no coincidence, but nor was Karen purely interested in style or novelty. Trained as an aeronautical engineer, he was also extremely practical, but he recognised that good design was not only a matter of form and function, but also fantasy.
