Industrial Design
Industrial Design (ID) is many things yet it all depends on who you ask, what industry they are in and what country they are from. ID is the heart and brain of Product Development and Industrial Design, if done concurrently with the entire development process along with marketing and sales, will lead to the purest of successful solutions.
ID in a nut shell, is how humans interact with man-made objects through all 6 senses of the human psyche. All human factors, through an object’s promotion, sales, training, use/ergonomics, maintenance, repair, resell and end of life, ones sight, touch, smell, hear, and kinesthetic sense may all play important roles in defining a design.
Depending on the objective, deliverables such as hand sketch, line drawing, hand rendering, computer illustration, CAD/Solid Model or video animation can be used to communicate or specify a product to 1. Acquire Funding, 2. Test for Market Research, 3. Build a Prototype and ultimately for 4. Manufacture for Distribution.
In America, ID is often considered a more graphical specialty as compared to our European counterparts and those at R2FACT, who both believe that true ID integrates the tasks of Research, Design, Engineering, Prototyping, Manufacturing, Merchandizing, Marketing, Sales and Distribution concurrently.
ID Defined
The formal scholastic definition of “Industrial design (ID) is the professional service of creating and developing concepts and specifications that optimize the function, value and appearance of products and systems for the mutual benefit of both user and manufacturer.” www.idsa.org.
History of Industrial Design
As industrialization accelerated and consumer goods proliferated after 1865, competition forced manufacturers to focus on product appearance. Ordinary citizens aspired to comfort, even luxury: patent furniture, lush domestic interiors, and eclectic mail-order goods. New materials like celluloid simulated expensive ivory and tortoiseshell. Although an industrial design profession did not exist in the late nineteenth century, the architect Frank Lloyd Wright articulated its principles in 1901 by advising artists to abandon craft production and create prototypes for factory reproduction.
Henry Dreyfuss, Norman Bel Geddes, Raymond Loewy, and Walter Dorwin Teague became celebrities. General Electric, Sears Roebuck, and other companies established in-house design departments. Some designers sought to transform society, as at the utopian New York World’s Fair of 1939, but more commercial considerations inspired Egmont Arens to describe his profession as “consumer engineering.”
During World War II, designers boosted morale by visualizing postwar products in magazine advertisements: prefabricated housing, bubble‐domed automobiles, and push‐button telephones. The profession became institutionalized in the American Designers Institute (1938) and the Society of Industrial Designers (1944); both later consolidated as the Industrial Designers Society of America (1965).” www.encyclopedia.com
Author
