What is Industrial Design?

Within the next few weeks I'm going to be blogging a lot about Industrial Design, so I thought that I'd introduce the ideas and my views in a blog post before I get right into what I'm working on.

At the beginning of the school year I got two books. Actually one book and one was given to me; Vision In Motion and The Design of Everyday Things. Industrial Design feels new, even though it's been around for a while. Basically, all the modern ideas of design came with the industrial revolution. Before then there was no way to get your product to an entire population of people, so there was no need for people to collect and think about how things should be made. The Bauhaus is something that has come up in my art studies a lot, and now that I'm studying industrial design I can really see how important that school was. The Bauhaus was the first time that people collected and thought intelligently about design, and that's where industrial design was born. One of the most memorable things I read in Vision in Motion was that design for Americans isn't focused on quality because we are so rich that we buy new models and versions before the old one's are broken. Vision in Motion was written in the fifties, but that idea is still very true today. The Bauhaus look at design through their lens, a war-torn country that needed basics to survive. Buildings became boxes because that was the most functional thing at the time. Functionality is the idea that I'm trying to introduce here. Without functionality, whatever you're designing is useless. It doesn't matter how pretty or expensive the thing is, if it doesn't work well, then you as a designer has failed. Now, you can continue to dissect what is and isn't functional for different groups of people. To a designer in America in the 1950s, it makes sense to replace some parts with cheaper plastic because the user would buy a new one soon, but for Europe in the 1950s, cheaper materials would be bad design. Functionality is everything.
Form and functionality is actually everything. If you buy a knife and you can't figure our how to hold it, then it's bad design, even if that knife is the sharpest knife in the world. Form and function together is what creates great design. The product's physical shape should signify what it does. There are two big words that Don Norman stresses in The Design of Everyday Things, and they are affordances and signifiers. It's much easier to talk design if you understand these two words. An affordance is an action that the product does. A knife affords cutting and holding. Signifiers tell you what the affordances are. In many cases, an affordance is a signifier. A knife affords cutting and the blade signify's that. True good design is able to mix affordances and signifiers without signs, while a bad design needs signifiers to counteract the signifiers that the affordance has. A door that looks like it should be pulled, but really should be pushed, is an example of bad design. You need a sign to tell people the door should be pushed rather than pulled, and that's bad design.
Now, the examples I'm giving make it seems like I'm upset with the things that are badly designed in the world, and one might think, why would I care? The reason is that we as humans aren't supposed to be worried with simple tasks. The reason one needs to design things to make them easy to use is because most people aren't experts in that object. The controls to an airplane are difficult to manage because the people who use them are experts. You shouldn't need to be an expert with computers to write your school paper. I look at design like this, engineers create new things, designers let you use those things. So much of our human stress is caused by bad design. Your entire day could be ruined by a printer that keeps jamming. Many people dismiss the product for their stress but in reality, if you don't know what all those buttons are for on your dishwasher, or which way to plug in a USB cable, it's not your fault. Your job isn't to know how to handle these things, that's the designers' job, and we translate it so you can use it. If you need to read instructions to set up your coffee machine, that machine was designed badly (unless you're like my dad and have a thousand dollar espresso machine for the coffee purists). It's not too much to ask for a reliable product for something as simple as coffee.
The project I'm working on is a tent. Tents are some of the most confusing products out there. Most people who go camping aren't wilderness experts, so why do tents come with pages and pages of instructions if all I want to do is go out for a night? I'm trying to fix that with my tent project, and I'll explain in depth, using the theory I've discussed in this blog post.

Books

I have hit a very interesting artistic block in the past few days. Recently, I wrote an artistic statement about why art is important to me, I'll copy it on here:
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Asking an artist why art is important to them is like asking a sailor why his ship is important to him. Without it, we do not exist. Without art, the person who I am today could not physically exist just as a sailor could not exist without his vessel to travel in. To some, my reasoning may sound less aesthetic than what they might imagine. I don’t need art to convey the deep complexities of my emotions or to try and bring a positive message to the world. I need art to be me. It’s selfish and shallow but that’s the way it should be. Art is important because it is the idea that I sail on everyday, and without it I’d drown.

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I have come to accept art as a key part of my life, but I have also chosen to not make art my career. It's a bit hypocritical for me to say that I need art to survive but then decide that I want to be a designer. It all connects, but somewhere I feel a little guilty that I don't want to be a professional artist when I'm older, especially when I so truly believe art to be a part of me. The block that I've reached is in regards to how can I be successful as a designer/ artist. If art is supposed to be so personal to me, then why am I using the artistic skills I've learned to make something that isn't personal, in fact it's the opposite, design is thinking all about the user, and not about me. I've been reading The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman and he describes that one of the biggest flaws in design is the lack of attention on the user, and designing the product for oneself. Isn't that what art is? Is the problem with bad design that it is too artistic and personal? No, I know that's not right because artists are much better designer than engineers. Bad design is bad because it fails to understand the human mentality of approaching an object, making the product too technical and complicated. It's personal because only the person who designed it knows how to use it. That isn't art because as personal as art is, it is still meant to be shared. But at the same time, approaching design as an artist is still wrong because your focus needs to be on the user. Art is personal, bad design is personal. I am an artist and a designer. Is the block clear now?

I'm not really all that worried about it, but that's been the idea rolling around in my head ever since I started really getting into that book. It's fascinating and the more I read about design the more I want to do it. It's just that this love I'm growing for design is coming at a time when I'm just starting to understand art. 

I did get some solace after reading the introduction to An Accidental Masterpiece by Michael Kimmelman when he explained how amateurs are lovers of their craft. I think that I can be content as an amateur of art rather than a professional. Like the herd of people at the piano recital, I can always continue painting. What I really fear is that I might lose the passion for personal art. What if I get so into design, and thinking about the user, that I forget to make art that is personal for me. If I went professional artist then I'd be insuring that I'd make art because that would be my living. As an amateur I rely purely on my own will, and that is scary because I don't know if my will to make art will be as strong as it is now in ten years. I want to be an artist for the rest of my life, but I also want to be a designer, tackling the problems of objects and creating new and creative solutions. I know that they can coexist, but the possibility that they might not is troubling. 

I Am Not Scared

It's ironic how, for the first time in a long time, I'm not scared during what should be a very stressful and scary time in my life. School starts tomorrow, and I've just finished up writing my summer paper and doing some other work for tomorrow and now I feel completely prepared. I'm not scared about the huge amount of work that my college preparation will take, nor am I scared of the difficult classes I'm taking, rather, I look forward to everything I can accomplish this year. There is nothing better than optimism, and this year I have more optimism than I've ever had going into school. I feel that I've reached a point of my life where I can reflect back on and not be disappointed in myself. For the past three years of high school I've been battling trying to discover who I am and that struggle has manifested itself in a lot of disappointing variations of myself. I don't deny that I won't go through more discovery this year, or in the rest of my life, but I think that I have finally chosen a path I can be proud of and I can start to grow in, rather than try and model who I am based on what other people say will make me happy. 

I have decided that I want to go to art school. That decision in itself was one of the most difficult things I ever had to do because of the internal conflict I went through. 

First, I had to accept the idea that I could get into art schools. I've been drawing and painting seriously for less than a year and the idea that I have the ability to get accepted somewhere was hard to grasp for me. Accepting the fact that I'm good enough to get into the schools I want to go to was incredible for my self esteem. 

Second, I had to find something to study. Industrial design was a term that I heard floating around before, but I never thought about it seriously until I started to research what it is industrial designers do. I fell in love with the major after a day of research. As much as I love art, I don't want to spend four years learning how to paint. Finding a major that could fulfill my artistic desires with a more concrete career apart from "artist" after graduation was something I needed if I wanted to pursue art in college 

And thirdly, I had to accept the workload that my decision would entail. The work is enjoyable work, mostly, but that only means that I need to work harder because I'm supposed to like it. I used to want to be like my aunt, spending years in college, getting a doctorate in a very specific category and taking teaching jobs on the side while I travel the world. I abandoned that idea just because I realized that my aunt's career is mostly writing papers, applying for grants and hours of research. I love anything social studies related, but I couldn't accept the workload that a career in that field would entail. I accept the fact that I might have sleepless nights finishing up a project or spend tedious hours trying to draw a live figure model. I understand that it all wont be fun, but I still want to do this. 

Being secure in what I want makes life so much easier. I know what I have to do to get what I want and I'm not scared about failing because right now failure feels impossible.