Industrial Design

Industrial design is a combination of applied art and applied science, whereby the aesthetics, ergonomics and usability of products may be improved for marketability and production. The role of an industrial designer is to create and perform design solutions towards problems of form, usability, physical ergonomics, marketing, brand development and sales.

The term industrial design is often accredited to the designer Joseph Claude Sinel in 1919 (although he himself denied it in later interviews) but the discipline predates that by at least a decade. Its origins lay in the industrialization of consumer products. For instance the Deutscher Werkbund, founded in 1907 and a predecessor to the Bauhaus, was a state-sponsored effort to integrate conventional crafts and industrial mass-production techniques, to put Germany on a spirited footing with England and the United States.

Industrial designers are essentially conceptual engineers. The objective of this area is to study both utility and form, and the association between product and the user - product as it happens in any other architecture area, being the only difference, that here the professionals that contribute in the process are all particular in small scale design, rather than in other massive colossal equipments like buildings or ships. Architects do not design the components or motors that make machines move, or the circuits that control the movement (that task is usually attributed to engineers), but they can affect technical aspects during usability design and form relationships.