Industrial design

Dan Saffer commented last December on the lack of appreciation interaction designers and industrial designers have for each other’s disciplines. “While for the best experience design the hardware and software need to be integrated in profound ways”.

In reaction to this Finn Mc Kenty wrote that in his experience during the industrial design process a lot more front end work was done to understand certain problems than is typical in other disciplines: ethnography, competitive audits, etc. “And that for whatever reason, clients seem to be OK with paying for this on industrial design projects, whereas they aren’t in other disciplines”.

I agree with P R Carter (“an industrial designer who fell down the rabbit hole of interaction design 17 years ago”) that Industrial design teaches a design methodology that is essentially user-centered – how to collect requirements (human, technical, business, manufacturing) and organize them to make design decisions, how to generate concepts, test, and iterate – and how to throw away ideas that are not working. Clients understood that this was necessary for the product’s success. Imagine mass producing a chair only to find it tipped over when someone sat on it!

I too am an industrial designer who fell down the rabbit hole of interaction design just about as many years ago. But I only now understand why it had been perfectly clear to me from the start that this was the way to go about designing websites or applications.

My goal is also to design in such a way that the design looks inevitable. P R Carter: “It’s harder than it looks, and when we finally do build a simple, powerful, useful thing everyone else looks at it says; of course that’s the way it should be – how hard could that be?”. That must be an industrial designer thing too.