Industrial design

Industrial design is a process of design applied to products that are to be manufactured through techniques of mass production. Its key characteristic is that design is separated from manufacture: the creative act of determining and defining a product's form and features takes place in advance of the physical act of making a product, which consists purely of repeated, often automated, replication. This distinguishes industrial design from craft-based design, where the form of the product is determined by the product's creator at the time of its creation.Dyce's report to the Board of Trade on foreign schools of Design for Manufactures. Mr Dyces official visit to France, Prussia and Bavaria for the purpose of examining the state of schools of design in those countries will be fresh in the recollection of our readers. His report on this subject was ordered to be printed some few months since, on the motion of Mr Hume.Industrial Designers Society of America, Industrial design is a process of design applied to products that are to be manufactured through techniques of mass production. Its key characteristic is that design is separated from manufacture: the creative act of determining and defining a product's form and features takes place in advance of the physical act of making a product, which consists purely of repeated, often automated, replication. This distinguishes industrial design from craft-based design, where the form of the product is determined by the product's creator at the time of its creation. All manufactured products are the result of a design process, but the nature of this process can take many forms: it can be conducted by an individual or a large team; it can emphasize intuitive creativity or calculated scientific decision-making, and often emphasizes both at the same time; and it can be influenced by factors as varied as materials, production processes, business strategy, and prevailing social, commercial, or aesthetic attitudes. The role of an industrial designer is to create and execute design solutions for problems of form, function, usability, physical ergonomics, marketing, brand development, sustainability, and sales. For several millennia before the onset of industrialisation, design, technical expertise, and manufacturing were often done by individuals craftsmen, who determined the form of a product at the point of its creation, according to their own manual skill, the requirements of their clients, experience accumulated through their own experimentation, and knowledge passed on to them through training or apprenticeship. The division of labour that underlies the practice of industrial design did have precedents in the pre-industrial era. The growth of trade in the medieval period led to the emergence of large workshops in cities such as Florence, Venice, Nuremberg and Bruges, where groups of more specialized craftsmen made objects with common forms through the repetitive duplication of models which defined by their shared training and technique. Competitive pressures in the early 16th century led to the emergence in Italy and Germany of pattern books: collections of engravings illustrating decorative forms and motifs which could be applied to a wide range of products, and whose creation took place in advance of their application. The use of drawing to specify how something was to be constructed later was first developed by architects and shipwrights during the Italian Renaissance. In the 17th century, the growth of artistic patronage in centralized monarchical states such as France led to large government-operated manufacturing operations epitomised by the Gobelins Manufactory, opened in Paris in 1667 by Louis XIV. Here teams of hundreds of craftsmen, including specialist artists, decorators and engravers, produced sumptuously decorated products ranging from tapestries and furniture to metalwork and coaches, all under the creative supervision of the King's leading artist Charles Le Brun. This pattern of large-scale royal patronage was repeated in the court porcelain factories of the early 18th century, such as the Meissen porcelain workshops established in 1709 by the Grand Duke of Saxony, where patterns from a range of sources, including court goldsmiths, sculptors and engravers, were used as models for the vessels and figurines for which it became famous. As long as reproduction remained craft-based, however, the form and artistic quality of the product remained in the hands of the individual craftsman, and tended to decline as the scale of production increased. The emergence of industrial design is specifically linked to the growth of industrialisation and mechanisation that began with the industrial revolution in Great Britain in the mid 18th century. The rise of industrial manufacture changed the way objects were made, urbanisation changed patterns of consumption, the growth of empires broadened tastes and diversified markets, and the emergence of a wider middle class created demand for fashionable styles from a much larger and more heterogeneous population. The first use of the term 'industrial design' is often attributed to the industrial designer Joseph Claude Sinel in 1919 (although he himself denied this in interviews), but the discipline predates 1919 by at least a decade. Christopher Dresser is considered among the first independent industrial designers. Industrial design's origins lie in the industrialization of consumer products. For instance the Deutscher Werkbund, founded in 1907 and a precursor to the Bauhaus, was a state-sponsored effort to integrate traditional crafts and industrial mass-production techniques, to put Germany on a competitive footing with Great Britain and the United States. The earliest use of the term may have been in The Art Union, A monthly Journal of the Fine Arts, 1839. The Practical Draughtsman's Book of Industrial Design by Jacques-Eugène Armengaud was printed in 1853. The subtitle of the (translated) work explains, that it wants to offer a 'complete course of mechanical, engineering, and architectural drawing.' The study of those types of technical drawing, according to Armengaud, belong to the field of industrial design. This work paved the way for a big expansion in the field drawing education in France, the United Kingdom and the United States.