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.