What is Industrial Design? Here are 5 Definitions

What is industrial design? It’s a really good question. Like so many good questions, it has simple answers, complex answers, misleading answers, and generally a lot of different kinds of answers depending on who is doing the answering. This is not some elaborate scheme to obfuscate the truth. There are good reasons the question is hard to answer. In this essay, I’m going to give five definitions of industrial design and discuss why I think this question isn’t so simple.

Let’s start with a straightforward answer.

Definition #1

Industrial design is the design of industrially manufactured goods and services. 

Pretty clean. Dictionary-esque. But then…why does this question keep coming up? Why don’t we feel like we understand the answer yet?

Part I: Low Cultural Awareness

Let’s back up a little. One of the most interesting things about this question, What is industrial design?,  is how many people ask it. I’m sure there are a lot of professions where laypeople are hazy on the details or even completely oblivious to the existence of your profession. But even in the land of design, industrial design has a long row to hoe in terms of educating the public. A testament to this is: very few reality TV shows are dedicated to it. Fashion design, interior design, graphic design: we get these. We’ve seen depictions of these. But the closest we get to industrial design is something like Netflix’s Hack my Home or that furniture one that Ellen hosted, what was that? These shows definitely involved industrial design but that wasn’t how they were framed. One was framed as an interior design + technology show, and one was framed as a furniture show. 

I am continually explaining what I do to friends and family, and the fact that I need to explain, the fact that they don’t already know, is not about education level. It’s just not prominent on our cultural radar in the U.S. 

Countries like Italy, Sweden, and Denmark—and generally European and Scandinavian countries more so than others—have a stronger cultural awareness of design. People are more likely to know who designed their sofa or their toaster. While the U.S., like those other countries, has many prominent designers in her history, and there is plenty of general patriotism, we lack the cultural solidarity for pride in our great designers to be sufficient to put them on the pop culture map. While we appreciate beautiful things, when we see a lovely object or experience a compelling space, we lack the habit of asking, I wonder who designed this?

Part II: ID is a Young Profession

One reason is the relative youth of the industry. If you want to dive into the history of industrial design, I highly recommend RISD professor Matthew Bird’s YouTube channel. He’s brilliant, passionate, and really brings the history to life. The skeletal version is that it began with the industrial revolution in the late 1800’s, and shifted toward the present incarnation with the technological advancements of the 40s and 50s after WWII. This coincided with the rise of key designers like Raymond Loewy, Henry Dreyfuss, Norman Bel Geddes, Walter Teague and Harold Van Doren, as they realized the power of thinking holistically about the product they were creating, the brand they were creating it for, and the market they were trying to serve, pairing all of these insights with the new materials and manufacturing technologies of the era.

N.B. The history of ID is incredibly interesting as it is closely tied up with the history of technology, engineering, politics, art, social movements, architecture, marketing, and economics.

It’s not nearly as codified and structured as disciplines like medicine, chemistry, art, literature…industries that are hundreds or thousands of years older than ID. Compared to these, ID is like a teenager in a room full of ancients. It also hasn’t had as much time to disseminate its knowledge and, for our day to day existence, it is not critical that we understand how the objects that surround us came to be. 

Part III: Tricky [Abstract] Terminology

The youth of the industry is not the biggest issue though, in my opinion. The bigger issue is the unwieldiness of the word ‘industrial’, the slipperiness of the word ‘design’, and the vast kitchen sink of meaning you get when you put them together.  

Industrial has a stereotypical meaning in this context: of or relating to an industrial manufacturing facility - a factory. Design for factories. 

Yes, ID is that…but not every product is made in a factory, and design is not only about products. And what is industrial production, anyway? As it stands, the spectrum of industrial production ranges broadly from mechanization to craft: from a fully mechanized production line to one with little to a ton of human labor performing or facilitating that labor with machines, to machines completing certain phases of production and humans doing the rest (by hand or with machines), to humans working with machines in a highly skilled way as we approach the craft end of the spectrum.  

At the craft end of the spectrum it gets chaotic, as you have artisans, craftspeople, technicians, and designers doing some amount of labor by hand, usually being assisted by machines, and whether or not a project qualifies as industrial is a matter of intention. I find people don’t tend to worry too much about what it is called, they are busy working. 

To me the important question is: is there a system for making the same object or experience, consistently, more than once? As many times as the maker has the resources for? Even if the thing you are making is an experience in a fast food checkout line…Sounds industrial, even if the maker only makes one. 

Then design! Design with a little d is already a useful word that we use all the time, similar to the way we use ‘plan’ or ‘pattern’. 

Design with a big D is harder to pin down, but at heart it’s about problem solving to change a situation for the better. This is good…but it also sounds like what most people do every day to keep the trains in their lives running. Maybe even running on schedule.

I think the important distinction between the everyday creativity of humans, and all humans are inherently creative problem-solving machines, is the nature of the intention behind the problem solving. Designers (at least ideally) investigate the needs of the community, look to solve problems outside the scope of their own lives (of course, they try to solve their own problems as well, but not only those). They experiment and test their ideas. They solicit feedback and refine those ideas. Possibly they collaborate.

Designers have a PROCESS. Even when they abbreviate that process, they know it’s there. They practice and repeat that process again and again. 

Ok, so what do we get out of all that?

Definition #2

Industrial design is engaging in the design process (ideate, prototype, test, refine, repeat) to create consistent multiples of a product, service, or experience.

Part IV: What ID is NOT

OK! But it might also be useful to understand what industrial design is NOT. Here is another definition I find useful, from one of my mentors: 

Definition #3

Industrial design is NOT fashion design, interior design, graphic design, UX design, architecture, or urban design. It is responsible for everything left over, from pickups to paperclips. 

This means that the umbrella of ID covers nearly every physical thing populating the built environment that isn’t anchored to the ground. Here’s Tucker Viemester’s great video defining industrial design, which is based on the 1942 description from OG industrial designer Donald Dohner and highlights many great examples.

These examples includes sofas, curtains, tableware, electronics, cars, toys, sneakers, road signage, airport signage, cosmetics, snacks, museum exhibits, store layouts, park benches, and much more. Notice how different and unrelated many of the products in this list are? This variety is another aspect of why defining the discipline is so difficult. There are in fact really good reasons that there aren’t a lot of universal principles and guidelines and theories in industrial design. There kind of are, but they get often tweaked and tailored for the subgenres of various product categories and designer types. It’s hard to talk about comprehensively because the term encompasses so much. As a result, the definition is generic, in order to stay relevant for everything it includes. When training for industrial design, you don’t get assigned a lot of textbooks…you practice a process, again and again, on different types of projects.

So it’s not surprising that when we just hear the term ‘industrial design’ in isolation, we’re not quite sure what it might mean, because there is a wide range of possible subspecies of ID it could be referencing. It gets more complicated, too, as it’s so common for industrial designers to have skills from other design disciplines, or to have dual specialization in other design disciplines. Many architects are also famously industrial designers, many industrial designers are often interior or graphic designers, etc.

The title designer is a bit like the title ‘doctor’. We understand that this could refer to a medical specialist like a heart surgeon, an orthopedist, or a medical generalist like a primary care physician. If we just hear ‘doctor’, they could also be an academic with a PHD in any number of specialty areas. There is only so much this term conveys, and more than telling us the kinds of tasks this person is capable of, it is communicating a rigorous, scientific mindset they are likely to have and a minimum schooling level they possess. 

Similarly, if we just hear designer, we can imagine that this person has some training and skill at communicating visually and thinking critically about the form and function of…anything. And probably there’s a category of thing that they’re especially good at creating and assessing.

Definition #4

As medical doctor implies a certain foundation of knowledge about how the human body functions, if we hear industrial designer, we can imagine the visual communication and ability to assess form and function that any design suggests. On top of that we can imagine an awareness of materials, manufacturing techniques, user experience, and an understanding of how to identify problems, theorize solutions, and develop and test those solutions, whatever the target industry or product area might be. 

If it feels like that’s getting a bit long and messy, definition-wise…yeah. Not wrong. Your cocktail party interlocutor is planning their escape.

Part V: Getting Concrete

I never seem to give the same answer twice, but I tend to rely on a series of examples to get the idea across.

Definition #5

ID is the design of goods and services for industrial manufacturing, and this includes everything from backpacks to light fixtures to buses to phones to playgrounds. It also includes the research and strategy behind these products, and a whole soup of hard-to-categorize stuff besides.

I’ve found this one to be the most practical when speaking to the average industry outsider. It anchors the concept in everyday objects (and services, and environments) while showing the breadth and diversity of those objects. That said, I’m open to suggestions.