Harold Van Doren was an American industrial designer who created numerous iconic streamlined design items including toys, radios, fans, and more. He also taught design and wrote several books on the subject. Van Doren is especially known for his innovative work in the 1930s designing products for the Toledo Synthetic Products Company in the new urea-formaldehyde thermoset plastic Plaskon.

Van Doren was born in Chicago and grew up in New Jersey. He had studied at the Art Students League in New York and following World War I then west to Paris and worked as an artist for the Chicago Tribune's Paris office. He returned to American in the mid-1920s, and worked as an editor and free-lance writer, and then from 1927 to 1920 as assistant director of the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

In 1931 he came to Toledo and established himself as a designer with partner John Gordon Rideout. Van Doren was brought in as designer and promoter of Plaskon products in the early 1930s by Williams College classmate Hubert D. Bennett. The first Plaskon products included lids for cosmetic jars, closures for tubes, small clock cases, salt shakers, and a small biscuit cutter produced in the millions and given free in boxes of Bisquick. In 1933, Van Doren designed a one-piece molded case for the Air-King radio. This gave him his first experience in designing a large molded housing. This was a difficult project, but its success and popularity led in 1935 to Van Doren's design for the one-piece housing of the Toledo Scale Company's Sentinel Grocery Scale, that replaced the old complex cast-iron scale.

His book, Industrial Design: A Practical Guide, published in 1940, remained a popular handbook through the 1960s.

See:

Meikle, Jeffrey L. American Plastic: A Cultural History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 121