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Slide 01
Industrial
Design
- The Art of Objects
- The discipline that shapes every manufactured object in your life — from the chair you sit on to the phone in your pocket — balancing beauty, function, ergonomics, and manufacturing reality.
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Slide 02
What Is Industrial Design?
- Definition
- Industrial design is the professional practice of designing products manufactured at scale. It sits at the intersection of art, engineering, and business — creating objects that are useful, usable, and desirable.
- Concerned with the entire product experience, not only aesthetics
- Must consider manufacturing processes, materials, and unit economics
- Encompasses consumer electronics, furniture, vehicles, medical devices, tools
- Distinct from graphic design (visual) and architecture (structure)
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Slide 03
Before Industrial Design
- Origins
- Before mass production, every object was handmade by skilled craftspeople who were simultaneously designers. The Industrial Revolution separated design from making — and created the need for a new discipline.
- Medieval guilds integrated design and production in one craftsperson
- 18th-century Josiah Wedgwood pioneered mass-market ceramics with design intent
- The Great Exhibition of 1851 showcased industrial products — and exposed design failures
- Arts & Crafts movement reacted against poor industrial aesthetics with handcraft revival
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Slide 04
Ford Model T and Mass Production
- 1908
- Henry Ford's assembly line (1913) and the Model T demonstrated that design decisions ripple through production economics, market access, and social change at civilisational scale.
- Standardisation of parts enabled the assembly line — a design constraint and enabler
- "Any colour as long as it's black" — a manufacturing decision with design consequences
- Price dropped from $825 (1908) to $260 (1925) through design-led production refinement
- The automobile became the defining industrial design challenge of the 20th century
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Slide 05
Bauhaus and the Designed Object
- 1919–1933
- The Bauhaus school united fine art, craft, and industrial production — designing furniture, lamps, typography, and textiles that could be manufactured and widely distributed. It remains the foundation of design education.
- Marcel Breuer's Wassily Chair (1925) — tubular steel, mass-producible, revolutionary
- Wilhelm Wagenfeld's table lamp (1924) — functional beauty in glass and metal
- Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona Chair (1929) — enduring icon of modern furniture
- "Art and technology — a new unity" as the Bauhaus's defining aspiration
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Slide 06
American Streamlining
- 1930s–1940s
- Inspired by aeronautics and speed, American designers wrapped industrial objects — trains, cars, refrigerators, pencil sharpeners — in smooth teardrop forms that signalled modernity, power, and forward motion.
- Raymond Loewy designed the Pennsylvania Railroad S1 Locomotive (1937)
- Norman Bel Geddes's Futurama exhibit at 1939 World's Fair — designed the future city
- Streamlining applied even to static objects: kitchen appliances, radios, irons
- Industrial design emerged as a recognised, named profession in the United States
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Slide 07
Mid-Century Modern
- 1950s–1960s
- Post-war optimism, new materials (fibreglass, bent plywood, foam), and Scandinavian craft traditions converged into a movement that made well-designed furniture accessible to the middle class for the first time.
- Charles and Ray Eames — bent plywood, fibreglass, and the Lounge Chair (1956)
- Eero Saarinen's Tulip Chair (1956) — one pedestal base eliminating table "slum"
- Danish masters: Arne Jacobsen, Hans Wegner, Finn Juhl — wood and craft
- Herman Miller and Knoll democratised modernist furniture through retail
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Slide 08
Dieter Rams and Braun
- 1954
- Dieter Rams joined Braun in 1955 and developed a philosophy of restrained, honest, functional design that remains the most cited design doctrine in the world — directly inspiring Apple's product design language.
- SK 4 record player (1956) — "Snow White's coffin" — transparent lid, geometric
- 606 Universal Shelving System (1960, Vitsoe) — still in production today
- Ten Principles of Good Design: innovative, useful, aesthetic, honest, unobtrusive...
- "Less, but better" — the most quoted phrase in industrial design
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Slide 09
Italian Design Renaissance
- 1960s–1970s
- Italy merged craft tradition with avant-garde thinking to become the world's design leader — producing iconic objects for Olivetti, Fiat, Ferrari, and Alessi that defined global notions of style and desirability.
- Ettore Sottsass designed the Valentina typewriter for Olivetti (1969) — cultural icon
- Joe Cesare Colombo — radical living units and stackable furniture for the space age
- Gio Ponti's Superleggera chair (1957) — lightest production chair of its era
- Milan became (and remains) the world capital of furniture and product design
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Slide 10
Memphis Group and Anti-Design
- 1981
- Ettore Sottsass and the Memphis Group exploded in 1981 with garish patterns, clashing colours, and deliberately anti-functional objects — a postmodern provocation that asked: who decides what "good design" means?
- Carlton bookcase (1981) — asymmetric, laminated in pop-art patterns, celebrated
- Rejected Bauhaus rationalism, Swiss minimalism, and Modernist orthodoxy
- Influenced fashion, graphics, and interior design throughout the 1980s
- Memphis lives on in every "maximalist" design trend of the present day
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Slide 11
The Industrial Design Process
- Design Process
- Great products emerge from rigorous process — combining deep empathy with users, creative exploration, iterative prototyping, and engineering collaboration before anything reaches a factory floor.
- Research
- User observation, ethnography, competitive analysis, and need identification.
- Ideation
- Sketching, concept generation — explore broadly before narrowing focus.
- Prototyping
- Foam, 3D prints, clay models — make ideas physical to reveal flaws.
- Engineering
- Translate design intent into manufacturable, toleranced specifications.
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Slide 12
Materials Define Design
- Materials
- Industrial designers must think through the entire material lifecycle — how a material is sourced, processed, formed, finished, used, and eventually disposed of. Material choice is a moral and aesthetic decision.
- Steel and cast iron — the backbone of the Industrial Revolution
- Aluminium — lightweight, corrosion-resistant, endlessly recyclable
- Plastics — revolutionary post-war versatility; now an environmental crisis
- Carbon fibre — extreme strength-to-weight for aerospace and sports equipment
- Bio-materials: mycelium, bamboo, recycled ocean plastic — the sustainable frontier
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Slide 13
Apple and Jony Ive
- 1998–2023
- Under Jony Ive, Apple elevated industrial design to a defining competitive advantage — products became cultural artefacts. The iMac (1998), iPod (2001), iPhone (2007), and MacBook Air (2008) each redefined their categories.
- iMac G3 (1998) — translucent bondi blue polycarbonate, instantly iconic
- iPod (2001) — 1,000 songs in your pocket; scroll wheel as interaction design poetry
- iPhone (2007) — eliminated the keyboard, redefined the touchscreen
- MacBook Air (2008) — unibody aluminium machined from a single billet block
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Slide 14
Ergonomics and Human Factors
- Ergonomics
- Industrial design must fit the human body — physically, perceptually, and cognitively. Poor ergonomics causes pain, injury, and error; good ergonomics enables flow, comfort, and safety.
- Henry Dreyfuss published "The Measure of Man" (1959) — anthropometric data for design
- Percentage populations: design for 5th–95th percentile to reach 90% of users
- Reach zones, grip sizes, button force, visual angles — all governed by body data
- Universal design: products usable by people of all abilities and ages
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Slide 15
Automotive and Vehicle Design
- Transport Design
- The automobile is the most complex designed object in mass production — requiring aerodynamics, safety, comfort, identity, and manufacturability to work together within millimetre-precise tolerances.
- Harley Earl at GM introduced annual styling changes and "planned obsolescence"
- Pininfarina, Bertone, and Giugiaro defined Italian automotive style for decades
- Chris Bangle's controversial BMW flame-surfacing language (2001) — polarising, influential
- Tesla and EV design: removing the grille freed designers to rethink the front entirely
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Slide 16
Furniture Design
- Furniture
- Furniture design sits at the intersection of craft, industrial production, and spatial experience. The designed chair — a form as simple as four legs and a seat — has produced some of the most celebrated designs in history.
- The chair as design challenge: 15 contact points, infinite load directions, aesthetic object
- Thonet's bentwood No. 14 chair (1859) — 50 million sold, still in production
- Robin Day's Polypropylene Chair (1963) — first mass-produced plastic chair
- Aeron Chair (1994, Herman Miller) — ergonomics as aesthetic and market breakthrough
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Slide 17
Medical and Healthcare Design
- Medical Design
- Industrial designers working in healthcare face an acute version of the discipline's core challenge: objects must function perfectly under stress, be intuitively usable by non-specialists, and signal reliability and care.
- Defibrillator design: legible, panic-proof interface for untrained bystanders
- Wheelchair and prosthetic limb design — where ergonomics and dignity intersect
- Hospital bed design: complex mechanical systems invisible to the patient
- Syringe, IV bag, surgical tool — humble objects with enormous safety implications
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Slide 18
Sustainable Industrial Design
- Sustainability
- The environmental impact of manufactured objects is now a primary design concern. Industrial designers are rethinking material sourcing, manufacturing energy, product longevity, repairability, and end-of-life disposal.
- Cradle to Cradle (McDonough & Braungart) — design products for infinite material cycling
- Right to repair: designing products that can be serviced rather than discarded
- Biomimicry: emulating nature's solutions for structure, insulation, and self-repair
- Circular economy models: product-as-a-service replacing product-as-ownership
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Slide 19
The Age of Consumer Electronics
- Consumer Electronics
- No category has advanced industrial design technique faster than consumer electronics — constant miniaturisation, new display technologies, and fierce market competition drove design to centre-stage.
- Sony Walkman (1979) — portable personal audio changed how we inhabit public space
- Game Boy (1989, Nintendo) — ergonomic design for children's hands and 30-hour batteries
- Samsung vs Apple: every industrial design decision is simultaneously a legal argument
- Wearables — smartwatches and earbuds are the new frontier of body-worn design
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Slide 20
Packaging as Experience Design
- Packaging
- The packaging of a product is the first physical interaction a customer has with a brand. Apple famously spent as much engineering effort on unboxing experience as on the product inside.
- Structural packaging design — form, protection, and shelf presence simultaneously
- The "unboxing experience" as designed brand theatre and viral social content
- Sustainable packaging: ending single-use plastic, designing for compostability
- Pharmaceutical packaging — child-resistance vs. elderly accessibility design tension
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Slide 21
Dieter Rams's Ten Principles
- Design Principles
- Dieter Rams articulated ten principles for good design that have become the most influential design philosophy in product history — direct inspiration for Apple, Braun, and a generation of designers worldwide.
- Good design is innovative — exploits new technology without being innovation for its own sake
- Good design makes a product useful — satisfies psychological and aesthetic criteria
- Good design is honest — does not mislead the user with false promises
- Good design is long-lasting — avoids fashionable trends, stays current for decades
- Good design is as little design as possible — back to purity, back to simplicity
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Slide 22
Where Design Meets Craft
- Craft
- The tension between hand-making and mass production has never been fully resolved. Today's most interesting industrial design often celebrates the trace of the hand within a manufactured object.
- Muji: celebrated simplicity and the beauty of no-brand manufacturing honesty
- Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec — small-series, refined, craft-informed product design
- 3D printing enables bespoke manufacturing at nearly industrial speed and cost
- The luxury sector: handmade exclusivity at the apex of mass-market aspiration
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Slide 23
CAD and Digital Design Tools
- Digital Tools
- Computer-aided design transformed industrial design from clay models and technical drawings to parametric 3D models, photorealistic rendering, and direct-to-machine manufacturing output.
- AutoCAD (1982) — first widely accessible 2D computer-aided drafting tool
- SolidWorks, CATIA, Rhino — 3D solid modelling for product design engineers
- Keyshot and Cinema 4D — photorealistic product rendering before prototyping
- Generative design: algorithms optimise geometry for strength, weight, and material use
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Slide 24
Industrial Design Meets UX
- UX Connection
- As products became digital-physical hybrids — smartphones, voice assistants, smart appliances — the boundary between industrial design and user experience design dissolved into a unified product design discipline.
- Physical affordances must communicate digital possibilities — form signals interaction
- Haptic feedback, button mechanics, speaker grille texture — all part of UX design
- Nest thermostat (2011, Tony Fadell) — product design and software design indistinguishable
- Voice-first devices require product design without any visual screen-based interface
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Slide 25
Fifteen Objects That Changed Design
- Iconic Objects
- Coca-Cola bottle (1915) — the most recognised form in history
- Eames Lounge Chair (1956) — democratic luxury at its finest
- Braun T3 pocket radio (1958) — proto-iPhone, fifty years early
- Verner Panton Chair (1967) — first single-piece injection-moulded plastic chair
- Sony Walkman TPS-L2 (1979) — headphones went from tool to lifestyle statement
- OXO Good Grips peeler (1990) — universal design made mass-market mainstream
- Apple iPhone (2007) — the most consequential industrial design of the century
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Slide 26
Design Around the World
- Global Perspectives
- Industrial design is a global discipline but cultural context shapes aesthetics, priorities, and approaches — resulting in distinctly different national design philosophies with international influence.
- Scandinavian design: democratic, craft-focused, nature-informed, deeply functional
- Italian design: emotional, expressive, culturally rich, tradition combined with provocation
- German design: systematic, rational, honest, engineered excellence before aesthetics
- Japanese design: precise minimalism, wabi-sabi, and kaizen (continuous improvement)
- American design: optimistic, commercial, accessible, driven by consumer market forces
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Slide 27
Studying Industrial Design
- Design Education
- Industrial design education combines studio practice, materials science, manufacturing knowledge, and human factors research — producing designers who can think across disciplines and advocate for the user.
- Top schools: Art Center (Pasadena), RCA (London), IIT (Chicago), Pratt, RISD
- Core skills: sketching, CAD, model-making, design research, presentation
- Internships at consumer electronics, automotive, and furniture companies are defining
- The design MFA opens research and academic paths beyond commercial practice
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Slide 28
Designing for Space
- Space Design
- Designing objects for microgravity, vacuum, and radiation is the most extreme version of industrial design constraints — where failure is catastrophic and weight is measured in dollars per kilogram.
- The space pen (Fisher): wrote upside-down, in zero gravity, in extreme temperatures
- NASA food packaging — sealed, calorie-dense, zero crumb trail in a spacecraft
- SpaceX Dragon capsule interior — designed by SpaceX with commercial airline aesthetic
- Space suit design: hard shell segments + soft joints; a wearable spacecraft
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Slide 29
The Future of Industrial Design
- Future
- As AI, robotics, and new materials transform manufacturing, industrial design faces both its greatest opportunity and its most urgent responsibilities — designing for a sustainable, equitable, post-carbon world.
- Additive manufacturing (3D printing) enabling mass customisation at scale
- AI generative design tools proposing optimised forms humans would never sketch
- Bio-design: growing products from living organisms — mycelium packaging, bacterial dyes
- Longevity design: objects built to last decades, repaired not replaced
- Emotional durability: designing objects people will love and keep, not discard
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Slide 30
Every Object Is
a Designed Argument
- Takeaway
- Industrial design is the discipline that asks: what should this object be? Not just what it looks like, not just how it works — but what relationship it creates between a person and the world. The best designed objects make that relationship feel inevitable.
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