DesignBytes

To keep passengers safe and chilled out, a lot goes into designing airline seats—including selecting the right color.

You are not holding just a red plastic party cup, you are holding a story, a lineage, a tragedy and a comforting cultural signifier of communal togetherness. You are holding a lesson in the pros and cons of ubiquity, and a model of clean design.

Read the employment growth rates, what skills are trending, and where in the US industrial designers work.

Over the years, some have noticed a minor turf battle for rights to the title of “designer.”

A recap of the second Square One conference (SQ1CON), hosted by nonprofit Advanced Design Sketching and created by Chicago design educator Hector Silva, IDSA.

Lisa Yong offers these words of advice to other young women looking to succeed in traditionally male-dominated fields.

This may sound like a generational battle but there is more to it. These debates encourage humility. You don’t find unity in what great designers love and hate as far as design tools. There is no “best” design method and no “best” design tool.

“If I hadn’t been involved in IDSA and going to the district conferences and events like that, I can’t say that I would be on the path that I am on now. It is part College and part me that took the initiative to be involved,” said ClayVon Lowe, IDSA.

The design field can be competitive and demanding, but it's a great career path for anyone truly passionate about art.

Apple and Samsung just ended their epic seven-year legal patent infringement fight.

An MIT startup reimagines the bra as a heart monitor—and aims to fill the data gap for women’s heart disease.

For Tucker Viemeister, FIDSA, there’s never been a separation between the making side of design and the social side. “It all boils down to how people treat each other,” he tells SYPartners in Episode 3 of this podcast series.

Advanced Design Sketching (ADS) is getting ready to host their second SQ1CON in Chicago this July 13 and 14 after a successful inaugural event last year. Hector Silva, IDSA tells the story of how ADS and SQ1CON came to be.

Haworth’s Fern Chair—an IDEA 2017 Bronze winner—is the result of an intensive five-year collaboration between Berlin-based industrial design studio ITO Design and the company’s design studio in Holland, MI.

For fun, an industrial designer gave US bills a redesign, starting with the material: Polymer.

Residential + commercial = resimercial, or interior design for commercial spaces that embrace the qualities of the home. It’s a trend that’s poised to change the industry for designers and manufacturers alike.

Design plagiarism is often intentional–but can just as frequently be accidental. And no wonder: Searching for similar logos and marks is nearly impossible in the warren of databases of American trademarks, much less in any other country.

Go inside California's ArtCenter College of Design, which has long been the place to train as an automotive designer, but recently branched out into wearables, too. "Basically, we've blown it up, building out a full curriculum, hiring more instructors, bringing in industrial sewing machines, turning out athletic/performance apparel, devices, and prostheses for the sports and health industries, with wearable tech embedded in its very fabric," Karen Hofmann, IDSA, said.

Thomas Teger, A/IDSA, talks about the challenges designers are facing in today’s digital product development process and lifecycle management, and how existing tools are addressing their needs only partially at best, if at all.

ID is enjoying a bit of renaissance thanks to aggressive work by automakers and suppliers to slash tailpipe emissions, improve safety and deliver a new user experience with autonomous vehicles.

"I think it’ll be a lot more effective from a design community and design culture element to start pointing out douchebaggy experiences that people are building and boasting and feeling proud of.” says Gadi Amit, IDSA.

Technology firms are increasingly looking to designers to help them shape the future and create objects with a greater sensory appeal, according to Google’s head of hardware design, Ivy Ross.

In 1985, Steve Jobs saw one design element as key to making computers consumer-friendly—the mouse.

Alan Ball, IDSA, testified in US Northern California District Court in San Jose for the Apple v Samsung trial.