What Exactly Is Industrial Design?
The term comes from the Industrial Revolution, where new technologies made manufacturing and commercializing products easier. In the past, making products and craftsmanship were combined since people were specialized in both, but after the Industrial Revolution the process of making and designing were separated.
There are key design aspects that make up Industrial Design: design for business, for people, for technology, for context, and for behavior. Design for business began with Raymond Loewy (“Father of Industrial Design”) who worked with companies to make their products more desirable, which basically connected business with design. Design for people is about creating products that met people’s everyday needs; it was about functionality and the user. Design for technology looks at how products can be improved along with evolving technologies. It also talks about how different materials can be used to make the same product, which the example used was a chair. Design for context means details, adaptability of the product, and the scale of how a product can be used. Finally, design for behavior is the interaction between a product and the user and how that varies from different types of products. In order to make the product easy to use and understand, we have to know how people behave.
Before reading this text, my interpretation of Industrial Design was designing products that could be manufactured or mass produced. But based on all these different aspects, Industrial Design considers a lot of things, so from my understanding it mainly looks at how people use products and the functionality of a product. Aesthetics is also another part that’s used as a selling point for people to want a product.
This extra video below also gives a brief overview of what Industrial Design is:
A Shift in Industrial Design
Towards the end of the reading, from “The Split Between Physical and Digital”, it starts talking about the rise of digital products. This made me realize that Industrial Design is not just physical products like a desk or chair, but it also includes digital products and even the software components. At the end, it emphasizes the idea of the user experience and I feel like this is really important because nowadays there’s a whole career dedicated to just user interface and user experience design (UI/UX).
This video also talks about how Industrial Design is evolving due to how we are shifting into a more technological society. Products these days often combine what would’ve been separate products into one; for example, a smartphone is a GPS, a watch, a phone, and a gaming device. He also talks about how the Internet has made getting a job as just an Industrial Designer is more difficult now because there so many resources online people can take advantage of. People now can learn how render things digitally and make it look pretty decent, which would’ve taken years of studying in the past. Since we are in a digital age, even Industrial Design is shifting more towards that instead of the traditional sketching and prototyping. Granted, those are still very important aspects of Industrial Design.
Product Design vs. Industrial Design
This is another thought I had because it seems like Product Design and Industrial Design are interchangeable. Here is a video that talks about the differences:
Based on what he said, Product Design is more about the software side and designing digital platforms whereas Industrial Design is also that but it includes physical objects as well. But after reading the comments by people who study Industrial Design and Product Design at different schools, I’m still not sure if there is a difference between the two.