Lawrence J. DeAngelis, a Designer, Engineer, and Inventor founded Eclectic Designs in 1974. People have said that DeAngelis is the Leonardo da Vinci of the twenty first century. He began to show his design talents when he won the Fisher Automotive Design Award when he was a sophomore at Saint Rita High School in Chicago. DeAngelis learned his people skills by selling cars as he worked his way through the University of Illinois. He was drafted into the Armed Forces during the Vietnam era, serving in the United States Navy. Upon release from the service he went to work for the Chicago Conveyor Corporation, starting as a drafting engineer. He was soon promoted to the position of Field Engineer that involved traveling all over the United States to start-up and tweak new pneumatic conveyor installations, which usually implicated part of his weekends, giving him a day off during the week. His father owned a furniture store, which gave him a buyers pass the Furniture Mart and the Merchandise Mart. Using his designing and engineering skills, he began to design homes and offices for people and take them to the Mart on his days off. He soon began to have more fun and make more money in the furniture business than he was making as an engineer, so he went to work in his father’s business fulltime. Near the end of the seventies, all the old craftsmen began to retire and the new craftsmen were not as talented as the old ones were, causing jobs to take longer to complete and more time and work for DeAngelis. About that time the microcomputer began to come to age, so DeAngelis purchased a computer, took technical classes to learn how to program a computer. He soon realized that designing a software application was very similar to interior design without the headache of sub-contractors. He went on to design and create several office automation applications, which usually included some kind of quoting or estimating function. In 1984 DeAngelis filed for his first patent and on March of 1987 he was granted a U.S. Patent No. 4,654,482 for a Home Merchandise Ordering Telecommunication Terminal, In October of 2003 he filed an application for a Remote Shopping System, and in April of 2007 he filed an application for an Targeted Product Specific Advertising Program. DeAngelis is currently working on an application for an Order Fulfillment and Restocking System, which will be filed this year [2007]. DeAngelis is an entrant in the Virgin Earth Challenge with a system that Converts Waste to Energy, which is a very interesting and exciting project.
