John Rheinfrank III, a consultant who made seamless connections between such seemingly disparate fields as technology, design and business, died Sunday of cancer at his home in Shadyside. He was 59.

For 25 years, Mr. Rheinfrank and his wife, Shelley Evenson, helped companies design products, operations and services and devise long-range strategies.

As a consultant to Xerox, Mr. Rheinfrank helped to design photocopying machines that allowed users to reload paper and clear paper jams themselves, something that previously had been done by technicians.

"He did that work 22 years ago, but the way people interact now with [copiers] came from that," said Evenson, whose recruitment by Carnegie Mellon University as a professor last year brought the couple to Pittsburgh from Chicago.

Until about five weeks ago, Mr. Rhein-frank commuted to Chicago, where he taught at the Kellogg Business School of Northwestern Uninversity.

What made Mr. Rheinfrank's work so visionary, his wife said, was his understanding of "technical aspects [and] also the emotional and aesthetic and business components. ... A lot of people might have two, but I don't know anybody else who has all three. He was quite amazing."

Mr. Rheinfrank was chief executive officer of seeSpace, the couple's consulting firm. Over the years, the couple did business with such corporations as AT&T, Kodak, Hewlett-Packard, Bank of Montreal, BP Amoco, Nissan, IBM and Raytheon, among others.

Dan Boyarski, professor and head of the school of design at Carnegie Mellon, said Mr. Rheinfrank was "very much a visionary in the larger field of design, communication, product interaction and also the ties that design has with business."

"He was very much someone who looked five to 10 years into the future."

Evenson was a student of Mr. Rheinfrank at Ohio State University, where he taught after earning his bachelor's and master's degrees in engineering and a doctorate in industrial and systems engineering.

After graduation, she moved to New York to work in industrial design. The two met again at Richardson Smith, later Fitch Inc., a design firm in Worthington, Ohio, and were married in 1983. At Fitch, they started the Fitch Exploratory Design Lab, which came to be recognized for its pioneering work in integrating business strategy and design.

Boyarski said the couple did "landmark work" at Fitch, where Mr. Rheinfrank rose to the position of executive vice president. One of their pioneering innovations then, he said, was their assembling of industrial designers, graphics designers, psychologists and other professionals across various disciplines to solve problems. That approach is now common in the design field, he said.

Besides his wife, Mr. Rheinfrank is survived by a daughter, Rachel Woodburn, of Columbus, Ohio; three sons, Todd, of New York, and Jake and Justin, both of Pittsburgh; his parents, John and Mary Rheinfrank, of Columbus; and two sisters, Kathy Howson and Lisa Collins, both of Columbus.

Friends will be received from 5 to 8 p.m. today in John A. Freyvogel Sons Inc., 4900 Centre Ave. at Devonshire Street, Oakland. A memorial service will be held at 1 p.m. Saturday in the First Unitarian Church of Pittsburgh, 605 Morewood Ave., Shadyside, followed by a procession to the family's home.

Memorial contributions may be made to the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, UPMC Cancer Pavilion, First Floor, 5150 Centre Ave., Pittsburgh 15232.