The Future of Industrial Design and My Part in It

With each passing year, I feel like we are coming closer to the brink of catastrophe. I don't like to sound apocalyptic, but everywhere I look I see that so little has changed in our consumerist, capitalist culture - the complete paradigm shift that we really need is not coming quickly enough. It's so hard to change one's ways, especially habits entrenched so deeply in society since the dawn of the industrial revolution. You could say industrial designers are the ones who got us into this mess, so now it's their responsibility to get us out of it. And I'm going to be part of that responsibility.

I had no idea what I was getting myself into when I chose to major in ID. I knew that I liked to draw things (especially things in perspective!), and I knew I loved to build stuff (especially with Legos!). That was about it. I was still obsessed with video games and I wanted to design the next iPod. But some things, inside and outside of my control, began to influence my design thinking once I delved deeper into RISD life and culture.

The foremost life change was my health. I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes about a month before coming to RISD for freshman year. Needless to say, it didn't make the transition to college particularly easy. But it wasn't exactly the illness itself that got my design wheels turning - it was a related treatment. For all of freshman year, I used a testing kit and syringe injections of insulin (all of which were industrial design products, although I did not think of them this way at the time). Then, at the beginning of sophomore year, I switched to using an insulin pump, which freed my life up a bit. Gone were the multiple injections per day, and all my insulin was in a single object. The system wasn't without its problems, but the fact that the pump resembled an iPod caused me to really connect it to industrial design. So I thought, "why not turn lemons into lemonade? I have this disease, and I'm managing it fairly well, but now that I can be an industrial designer, I could have the power to influence how I and others manage it too."

Discovering the world of medical design caused me to realize that a career in ID could be influential - I could really help better people's lives. I could do more than make things pretty or functional. I made a sort of promise to myself - that I would strive to use class assignments in a productive way. In Design Principles, I redesigned a blood sample container. For my CAD I class, I redesigned the insulin pump. By the end of sophomore year, I knew exactly where I wanted to go in ID.

But currents began to pull me in many different directions. My interest in photography sparked up again after taking an amazing photo class during wintersession. I began to play the piano, and sing more. Over the summer, my interest in graphic and web design resurfaced. Back at school, I became involved with RISD's Second Life Recycling Center, which invigorated my environmental consciousness. Surrounded by the green thinking there, and also in the ID classrooms, I was inspired to focus my projects on both medical and environmental issues. The project I'm working on in Service Design revolves around refilling product containers (things like laundry detergent, toothpaste, and pens) instead of throwing them away.

How little I knew when I first got here. And, paradoxically, the more I learn, the less I know. The world has become a daunting, hostile place to me, filled with greedy capitalist companies, greedy consumers (often myself included), oppressed people as a result, and overpopulation, among pollution and the accelerating destruction of our planet. Whew! Still, I believe that each little bit can make a difference. I maintain the hope that if each of us does something, no matter how small, to help improve our situation, then we can change this industry for the better. Whatever I do with my life's work, I want it to mean something to someone; I want to help improve the human condition.

I may still not know exactly where this career will take me, but then again, I am still discovering industrial design. I've been discovering it my whole life, even if I wasn't aware of it. Through this blog and this class, I've discovered its past and present. And I will continue to discover it for my whole life, as the world changes. One thing I'm sure of: I intend to have a voice in that change.

On the Edge: Design as Art

Designers are often smart in referencing nature. Biomimicry is especially important in this age of environmental awareness. Designers also can, and should be, influenced by art. Sometimes it's hard to make the jump. One doesn't usually walk up to a work of art and think, "Ah, this is a perfect inspiration for my new cell phone design!"

It's more subconscious than that. I actually think most designers (especially at RISD) are influenced by the fine art world, or at least by their own fine art background, more often than they believe. It is in this limbo, somewhere between art and design, where some people put their life's work. Is it a worthy cause? I personally think it would be a waste of time and resources if I did this kind of design, but what this genre does best is to help inspire other designers in their own work - much in the same way nature can inspire.

Designers have to solve real-life problems. Artists are solving problems of a different kind. Art is meant to be viewed, or experienced, and from there inspire individuals by sensory or narrative content. Designed objects may do all of these things as well, but they also have to function in everyday life and be useable by a large number of people. It's interesting to think about process and order when looking at the borderline between art and design. At the outset of a project, a designer's thoughts might reside quite close to the art world. This is where ideas are broadest, and most "blue-sky." This kind of unhindered thinking is what artists capture and run with, whereas designers move from these broad, perhaps impractical ideas, to paring down, appropriating to real-world experiences and limits, and ultimately creating something which goes into the hands of ordinary people. To re-iterate: Designed things are owned; artworks are experienced.

No one is going to buy pills that make your shit sparkle. Well, I shouldn't say no one - I bet there are many people who would want to use this. But the point is that this product is not intrinsically useful and it's not something that's meant to be experienced over and over again. It is certainly making a statement, but the novelty wears off quickly after that statement has been made.

What is useful about something as poetic as this is the creation and sharing of an idea. In sharing this conceptual vantage-point, and linking it closely to industrial design, Tobias Wong has afforded designers the opportunity to take his ideas and use them as inspiration for whatever project they themselves might be working on. And with many of his projects, he's done a lot of the work for them. So much, even, that many of his ideas (like the sparkly pills, and more appropriately his solar-powered moon jar concept) are all set for mass production. You can actually find the moon jar at Target.

So these more conceptual projects clearly have weight in the world of industrial design, if they are being mass manufactured and sold through consumer stores. And perhaps this is where the precious ideas die most quickly. More ephemeral, impractical concepts, have more behind them, in my mind. They have the potential to blossom and become more meaningful than some art project you might find on a store shelf. Take many of the works in "Design and the Elastic Mind" for examples.

One concept called "Sniffing Others", invites users to augment their senses of smell and touch by implanting objects inside themselves. There is a clear element of design to this work, but it is hardly viable at this point in time as a production-ready model. It is simply a concept - one that questions social norms and inspires designers to think outside of convention. Compare this model to the moon jar - they exist at different points along the design spectrum. The former lives right at the heart of "blue sky" thinking, whereas the latter has already become a real product.



Is there a right and wrong place to be if you're walking the art/design tightrope? Of course not. Some concepts work purely to inspire, and some do that plus a little more (or less, depending on how you see it).

Is 'Prius Hype' Completely Deserved?

Our family bought a Toyota Prius about two years ago. With it came a great feeling - we all thought we were getting a great-quality car which also had a lower environmental footprint. Although it was a bit more expensive up-front, and would take some time before our actual savings would appear, the Prius' direct impact on the environment while it is being driven is easily apparent.

But what's trickier to determine is the car's total impact, or net impact, on the environment. Is this technologically advanced, fuel-efficient, energy-recycling car really helping the environment any more than a regular old Ford coupe?

One journalist, Chris Demorro, seems to have a strong opinion on this matter. He's written an article comparing the environmental footprints of the Prius and the Hummer, cars perceived as being on completely opposite ends of the 'green' spectrum. He claims that the Prius is actually worse for the environment - not as a result of gas mileage, or size, but because of manufacturing. The Prius battery contains nickel, a highly toxic substance which is terrible for the environment when processed. And shipping parts back and forth across the world doesn't help matters either.

You can read the rest of the article yourself if you want all his details. I'm not sure how much I trust his facts, as he's cited no sources for the data. However, he is shedding an important light on the bigger picture, and has gotten me to think about green issues a bit differently. Sometimes the most environmentally friendly things to do aren't even quantifiable at the consumer level.

For example, I might choose to use a toilet paper with thinner sheets per role to save paper on my end, but if the manufacturing practices of that brand over another that makes thicker sheets is more environmentally detrimental, then ultimately I'm hurting the environment, not helping it. As I touched upon in my previous post, manufacturing design and practices are one of the largest contributors to environmental destruction. So looking at a product from this stage (before it gets to market) is where the change has to really start happening. The Prius may be environmentally beneficial to drive around, but Toyota should know it has a duty to make it safe to manufacture as well.

Designing be(for)e Disasters

Insurance companies can seem to be stupid sometimes.

The idea of insurance is inherently preemptive - it's something you think about ahead of time. It's proactive, in a way. So when my insurance company rejected coverage of a device on the grounds that I was "too healthy to warrant it", I was surprised. I needed to be sick enough to receive coverage? Wouldn't it be in the insurance company's best interest to keep me healthy, rather than wait until I became sicker, in which case they'd end up paying a lot more? I don't ultimately know why my insurance company initially rejected the proposal (luckily, they did eventually accept it), but my guess is that they weren't thinking ahead.

Being proactive and creating indemnity for disasters is not something humans seem to be good at. Generally, we address problems only after they have already occurred once - and once is one too many times. Herein lies a major problem with disaster relief efforts.

Hurricane Katrina is a prime example of this lack of design pro-activism. Everyone knew that the levies in the area were not up to spec, yet nothing was done to fix the problem. Now it's getting attention (although arguably still not the attention it deserves), but only after the catastrophe had struck. Kate Stohr, of Architecture for Humanity, tells us "You can’t design for disaster after the fact. Unless it's strategically thought about in advance of disaster, these ideas don't work" (Wortham).


Although obviously not intended as temporary, these dome houses clearly had some foresight behind them. They were designed with a solution to a specific problem in mind, and were created before that problem actually manifested.

So how does a design like the one above translate into a temporary structure? Two British engineers, Peter Brewin and William Crawford, have designed an inflatable concrete house which actually hardens into a permanent dome-like structure. The use of a new material called concrete fabric allows these shelters to be incredibly sturdy and last for up to ten years.

Because of their many positive characteristics, these "Concrete Canvas" shelters can address more than the need for disaster shelters. Aside from handling temporary or semi-permanent disaster shelter, they can be used for military operations. They're flame-retardant, can handle snow build-up, and are quite sterile inside. They're also modular and can be customized incredibly easily.

Designing for disasters can be viewed on the immediate scale, but recently I've been thinking that we all have an obligation as designers to look at a larger, global-level disaster that's occurring as I write this. It's not what you'd normally think of as a disaster, but it's been happening for a while - the slow destruction of our planet, and the continuing depletion of our resources, is quite a disaster indeed. What can we do to address this disaster? Should we stop designing things all together? That's obviously not the answer, because if we don't design and manufacture a cheap, popular product, someone else will. What we have to do is change the way the mass-produced products already entrenched in the consumer world are designed and manufactured, so we can begin to reduce our environmental footprint. Then maybe we can stop the climate from spitting out such terrible tsunamis and hurricanes!

Designing Meaning through Marketing

Vibrators have clearly changed in meaning since their creation. But this change came more through society and culture, and not so much as a result of a change in form or physical design. These products have always functioned in the same basic way, but what changed were peoples' attitudes towards them, and settings in which they were used. Consequently, minor physical changes have arisen, relating to packaging, coloring, marketing, and the like.

The vibrator began as a medical device, but has grown into a mass market product geared and advertised towards women. Women are still targeted by gender-specific advertising, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse. In fact, many of the vernacular products we don't give a second thought have "genders" attached to them.

Take the obvious examples of beauty products. Loreal shampoo in pink bottles means something very different than a bottle of Axe in black. There’s not usually anything on these products that says, “this is for a woman” or “this is for a man” but all the cultural cues are there. Brand names, shape, and color all speak for themselves. Even more obvious, of course, are things like hair replacement (which usually shows pictures of males or females right on the box), or shoe inserts, which clearly say for which gender they are made. It’s actually interesting that all of these products are so polarized in their marketing, because in reality a woman’s foot insert will probably work just fine for a man, and a woman certainly won’t have some perverse bodily reaction to using Axe.

Televisions have a similar story. When Sony introduced a new television line called “Bravia,” they marketed it as “the first television for men and women.” Sony seemed to really push this concept, releasing multiple ads emphasizing that this was one television that would somehow be "easier" for women to use.

The truth is, of course, that there wasn't anything about previous televisions that women couldn't handle. The Bravia televisions ' change in appeal was mostly cosmetic, but it was the marketing that truly changed peoples' perception of the product. If Sony hadn't given us the tagline or fed us the ads, no one would have looked at the Bravia and declared "these were designed for women!"

Marketing has a powerful effect on our subconscious (which is why we see it everywhere), but it's not the only thing that can direct the meaning of a product. Users themselves have the power to shape a product's meaning through re-appropriation. To take an extreme example, people have used their cell phones and iPods as flashlights in dire situations. I read a news article a while back describing how a man lost in the wilderness was saved because he used his iPod as a beacon to help rescue teams track him down from the air. Another interesting re-appropriation of the iPod comes from the military, which is using the device for translation.

Some of the lighter-hearted appropriations have seen people cooking on their laptops, because they can heat up so much. In fact, there's an entire do-it-yourself culture in which people modify a product so it becomes something completely new, and then post how they did it online for others to follow.