As an Industrial Design student, I’m relatively new to the design industry as a whole – 2 years of having my head in my sketchbook may have qualified me for my new position here at PDD, but I’m humble in the knowledge that I have very far to go. I like to think I have a solid foundation for my own personal interpretation of ‘how to design’; something my university can definitely take credit for. So what is my interpretation? Well, I’m an avid believer that design as an industry is transcendent – with each new graduate comes a flurry of further knowledge, further interpretation that can either build upon a pre-existing theory or completely revolutionise our thinking.
There have been quite a few examples through history; Henry Ford introduced mass manufacturing, Dieter Rams with clean design, Chris Bangle and deconstructivism and more recently the ‘Apple revolution’. These are examples of definitive moments in broader design history, but (through disregarding some of Dieter Rams’ views) they have all encouraged the expansion of consumerism. You may have just clicked as to what this blog post is discussing…
Caption: Chris Bangles idea of deconstructivism is now widely utilised within much of the automotive industry. Featured image credit: MarkyDMan and above image credit: BWM
Part of my time at Loughborough included a fascinating module in Sustainable Design, an ethic or ‘culture’ of design that is slowly but inevitably beginning to dominate the design process. For those of you unfamiliar with the specifics of sustainability, I encourage you to watch this video: ‘Sustainability explained through animation’.
Our decisions regarding material choices, functionality and even aesthetic have obscure consequences for the people who buy, produce and process our products. One example is in the role of cheap labour, where in order to drive down prices for western consumers the wages of the labourers are depressed as a subsidy. Sustainable design promotes the introduction of a system to alleviate the need to perform such practices, alongside a more sensible ‘bottom-up’ approach to producing a product.
Caption: C2C uses a dually-cyclical process. Image credit: Cradle to Cradle/Andrew Silbey