CategoriesDesign Concepts and Techniques
Industrial and Product Design
Design for mass production, shaping how manufactured objects look, work and feel, from ceramics and appliances to electronics.
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About
Design and manufacturing first split apart when factories divided labour. In the 18th century Josiah Wedgwood standardised his creamware for production in quantity, and in the 1870s Christopher Dresser designed metalwork specifically for machine production. The consultant industrial designer appeared in 1930s America. Raymond Loewy, Donald Deskey and Henry Dreyfuss restyled refrigerators, trains and telephones, and Russel Wright's American Modern dinnerware (1937) brought soft, organic shapes to ordinary tables.
Dreyfuss's book Designing for People (1955) put the measured human body at the centre of the work. In Germany Dieter Rams made Braun appliances quiet and legible, and later summed up his approach in ten principles of good design. Recent practice ranges from Philippe Starck's expressive objects to the Super Normal ideal championed by Jasper Morrison, while firms like IDEO design services and interactions as well as things. Look at mould lines, assembly and how comfortably the object fits the hand.