Industrial Design Software

[Violette Ransone]

Industrialdesigners typically focus on the physical appearance, functionality, and manufacturability of a product, though they are often involved in far more during a development cycle. All of this ultimately extends to the overall lasting value and experience a product or service provides for end-users.

Every object that you interact with on a daily basis in your home, office, school, or public setting is the result of a design process. During this process, myriad decisions are made by an industrial designer (and their team) that are aimed at improving your life through well-executed design.

This excerpt is from Objectified, a feature-length documentary by Gary Hustwit about our complex relationship with manufactured objects and the people who design them. The piece highlights the design of the OXO Good Grips line of kitchen utensils by Smart Design, a design consultancy based in New York City, NY.

Today, there are more than 29,500 working industrial designers in the United States and the median annual salary is $77,030. California, Michigan, and New York are the top three states with the highest concentrations of employed industrial designers per capita. (Sept. 2021, Bureau of Labor Statistics)

Emerging as a professional practice in the early 19th century, though there are examples well before this, industrial design can be directly linked to the industrial revolution and transition from small volume craft to mass-produced products for a consumer class population. Often straddling the line between artist and engineer, early industrial designers frequently found themselves in a position dealing purely with aesthetics and styling.

Today, industrial designers are commonly part of multidisciplinary teams made up of strategists, engineers, user interface (UI) designers, user experience (UX) designers, project managers, branding experts, graphic designers, customers, and manufacturers, all working together towards a common goal. The collaboration of so many different perspectives allows the design team to understand a problem to the fullest extent, then craft a solution that skillfully responds to the unique needs of a user.

In the final stages of the design process, industrial designers will work with mechanical engineers, material scientists, manufacturers, and branding strategists to bring their ideas to life through production, fulfillment, and marketing. After months, and sometimes years, of development, a product will find its way to store shelves around the world, where people can purchase it and bring it into their homes.

The industrial design profession is constantly shifting and evolving to keep pace with rapid advancements in technology, cultural trends, and socio-economic forces. Designers must now face new challenges that were inconceivable when the profession originated. It is indeed a fascinating time to work in the design industry.

Committing to and realizing their success will have a profound benefit that impacts so much more than just our organization alone. We want to demonstrate that institutional change is possible and we must lead by example.

Industrial design is a process of design applied to physical products that are to be manufactured by mass production.[1][2] It is the creative act of determining and defining a product's form and features, which takes place in advance of the manufacture or production of the product. Industrial manufacture consists of predetermined, standardized and repeated, often automated, acts of replication,[3][4] while craft-based design is a process or approach in which the form of the product is determined personally by the product's creator largely concurrent with the act of its production.[5]

All manufactured products are the result of a design process, but the nature of this process can vary. It can be conducted by an individual or a team, and such a team could include people with varied expertise (e.g. designers, engineers, business experts, etc.). It can emphasize intuitive creativity or calculated scientific decision-making, and often emphasizes a mix of both. It can be influenced by factors as varied as materials, production processes, business strategy, and prevailing social, commercial, or aesthetic attitudes.[3] Industrial design, as an applied art, most often focuses on a combination of aesthetics and user-focused considerations,[6] but also often provides solutions for problems of form, function, physical ergonomics, marketing, brand development, sustainability, and sales.[7]

For several millennia before the onset of industrialization, design, technical expertise, and manufacturing was often done by individual crafts people, who determined the form of a product at the point of its creation, according to their own manual skill, the requirements of their clients, experience accumulated through their own experimentation, and knowledge passed on to them through training or apprenticeship.[5]

The division of labour that underlies the practice of industrial design did have precedents in the pre-industrial era.[1] The growth of trade in the medieval period led to the emergence of large workshops in cities such as Florence, Venice, Nuremberg, and Bruges, where groups of more specialized craftsmen made objects with common forms through the repetitive duplication of models which defined by their shared training and technique.[8] Competitive pressures in the early 16th century led to the emergence in Italy and Germany of pattern books: collections of engravings illustrating decorative forms and motifs which could be applied to a wide range of products, and whose creation took place in advance of their application.[8] The use of drawing to specify how something was to be constructed later was first developed by architects and shipwrights during the Italian Renaissance.[9]

In the 17th century, the growth of artistic patronage in centralized monarchical states such as France led to large government-operated manufacturing operations epitomized by the Gobelins Manufactory, opened in Paris in 1667 by Louis XIV.[8] Here teams of hundreds of craftsmen, including specialist artists, decorators and engravers, produced sumptuously decorated products ranging from tapestries and furniture to metalwork and coaches, all under the creative supervision of the King's leading artist Charles Le Brun.[10] This pattern of large-scale royal patronage was repeated in the court porcelain factories of the early 18th century, such as the Meissen porcelain workshops established in 1709 by the Grand Duke of Saxony, where patterns from a range of sources, including court goldsmiths, sculptors, and engravers, were used as models for the vessels and figurines for which it became famous.[11] As long as reproduction remained craft-based, however, the form and artistic quality of the product remained in the hands of the individual craftsman, and tended to decline as the scale of production increased.[12]

The emergence of industrial design is specifically linked to the growth of industrialization and mechanization that began with the industrial revolution in Great Britain in the mid 18th century.[1][2] The rise of industrial manufacture changed the way objects were made, urbanization changed patterns of consumption, the growth of empires broadened tastes and diversified markets, and the emergence of a wider middle class created demand for fashionable styles from a much larger and more heterogeneous population.[13]

The first use of the term "industrial design" is often attributed to the industrial designer Joseph Claude Sinel in 1919 (although he himself denied this in interviews), but the discipline predates 1919 by at least a decade. Christopher Dresser is considered among the first independent industrial designers.[14] Industrial design's origins lie in the industrialization of consumer products. For instance, the Deutscher Werkbund, founded in 1907 and a precursor to the Bauhaus, was a state-sponsored effort to integrate traditional crafts and industrial mass-production techniques, to put Germany on a competitive footing with Great Britain and the United States.

Mr. Dyce's official visit to France, Prussia, and Bavaria, for the purpose of examining the state of schools of design in those countries, will be fresh in the recollection of our readers. His report on this subject was ordered to be printed some few months since, on the motion of Mr. Hume; and it is the sum and substance of this Report that we are now about to lay before our own especial portion of the reading public.

The school of St. Peter, at Lyons, was founded about 1750, for the instruction of draftsmen employed in preparing patterns for the silk manufacture. It has been much more successful than the Paris school; and having been disorganized by the revolution, was restored by Napoleon and differently constituted, being then erected into an Academy of Fine Art: to which the study of design for silk manufacture was merely attached as a subordinate branch.

It appears that all the students who entered the school commence as if they were intended for artists in the higher sense of the word and are not expected to decide as to whether they will devote themselves to the Fine Arts or to Industrial Design, until they have completed their exercises in drawing and painting of the figure from the antique and from the living model. It is for this reason, and from the fact that artists for industrial purposes are both well-paid and highly considered (as being well-instructed men), that so many individuals in France engage themselves in both pursuits.[15]

The Practical Draughtsman's Book of Industrial Design by Jacques-Eugne Armengaud was printed in 1853.[16] The subtitle of the (translated) work explains, that it wants to offer a "complete course of mechanical, engineering, and architectural drawing." The study of those types of technical drawing, according to Armengaud, belongs to the field of industrial design. This work paved the way for a big expansion in the field of drawing education in France, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

3a8082e126