What Is Industrial Design?
Design brings stories to life. —Yves Béhar, IDSA
Design is a plan for arranging elements in such a way as best to accomplish a particular purpose. —Charles Eames
Good design is making something intelligible and memorable. Great design is making something memorable and meaningful. —Dieter Rams
Industrial designers create and develop concepts and specifications that optimize the function, value, and aesthetics of products, environments, systems, and services for the benefit of user, industry, and society. Industrial design involves combinations of the visual arts disciplines, sciences, and technology, and requires problem-solving and communication skills. —National Association of Schools of Design Handbook
Good design is about making a product or design that serves a function better than anything else that has gone before it. It’s about looking at everyday things with new eyes and working out how they can be made better. —James Dyson
Industrial Design is a strategic problem-solving process that drives innovation, builds business success, and leads to a better quality of life through innovative products, systems, services, and experiences. Industrial Design bridges the gap between what is and what’s possible. It is a trans-disciplinary profession that harnesses creativity to resolve problems and co-create solutions with the intent of making a product, system, service, experience or a business, better. At its heart, Industrial Design provides a more optimistic way of looking at the future by reframing problems as opportunities. It links innovation, technology, research, business, and customers to provide new value and competitive advantage across economic, social, and environmental spheres. —Extended definition ratified by Icsid (now World Design Organization), 2015
Design is the first signal of human intention. —William McDonough
Design is a method of action. —Ray and Charles Eames
Design…is a manifestation of the capacity of the human spirit to transcend its limitations. —George Nelson, FIDSA
Industrial design is the professional service of creating and developing concepts and specifications that optimize the function, value and appearance of products and systems for the mutual benefit of both user and manufacturer. —NC State Industrial Design Program
Drawing on its historic contribution to responsible, human-centered design, Industrial Design (or ID) teaches students to use critical thinking and the design process itself to bring new value to companies, communities and citizens. Professors with expertise in a wide range of areas guide students in researching user experiences to create well-conceived and executed objects, products and systems that make everyday tasks easier. —Rhode Island School of Design
Product designers improve lives by creating consumer products—from game-changing wearables to life-changing medical devices to everything in between. —ArtCenter College of Design
An industrial designer typically creates new product ideas or re-designs existing products in a collaborative effort with marketing, engineering, and production teams. Designers create and develop product ideas and then communicate those ideas to clients and production entities through technical drawings, concept and final renderings, mock-ups, models and prototypes. —Department of Industrial Design, Metropolitan State University of Denver
Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service. —Steve Jobs
Design is about humanity and simplicity—a little help for daily life. —Andree Putman
Good design is not important, it is imperative. Good design costs little more. It is an attitude of the mind. It is not about cost. —Stuart Lipton
Industrial designers shape our world, from games and gadgets, to bicycles and boats, to highchairs and helmets. —Industrial Design Program, Savannah College of Art & Design
Design is about progress. It is the conceptualization and creation of new things: ideas, interactions, information, objects, typefaces, books, posters, products, places, signs, systems, services, furniture, websites, and more. Designers imagine and make. They also research and think. Skilled in one or more specialties of the discipline, designers use their abilities in collaboration with others. Designers want to make ideas real and to make a difference. A career in design is more than a job. It is a way of seeing; a way of interacting with the world. It is a way of life. —UIC School of Design
Good design is not about the perfect thing anymore but about helping a lot of different people build their own personal identities. —David Kelley
From concept and design, all the way to providing new ideas in the market place, Industrial & Interaction Design utilizes problem-solving innovation to develop and create products, systems, and services, helping businesses succeed and better our quality of life. —Purdue Department of Art and Design
Design is rooted in everyday life, every tap you turn, every doorknob you touch. —Karim Rashid
Industrial designers serve the consumer through sensitive and innovative collaboration with art, science, engineering, anthropology, marketing, manufacturing, and ecology. Industrial designers give form to virtually all mass-manufactured products in our culture. They seek opportunity and advantage through identifying and solving problems. Their creative contributions impact the utility, appearance, and value of our tools, toys, and environment. Their most innovative solutions lie at an intersection of what is knowable and what is possible. —Notre Dame Industrial Design Program
An industrial designer in today’s business world should be a businessman and engineer, and a stylist, and in that order. —Brooks Stevens, FIDSA, 1959
Industrial designers work at the intersection of art, business and technology. They enrich lives by creating objects and systems that reflect our psychological needs and social aspirations, provide order and structure for their companies, and improve our ability to understand, interact with and enjoy our world. —Wentworth Industrial Design Program
The field of design extends far beyond styling. Its boundaries are wider and require a deeper understanding of complex problems, critical thinking skills, interdisciplinary approaches and knowledge of cultural and economic changes in the world. We’re not as interested in designing a new chair as we are in proposing a better way of seating. —Product Design Program, College for Creative Studies
There are three basic principles behind any well-designed product: truth, humanity, and simplicity. —Sohrab Vossoughi
Any well-designed product or experience acknowledges the user. It’s that respect for the used that makes a design great. —Clement Mok
Design is the liberal arts of the information age. —Richard Buchanan
Design defines much of what we do or touch. In part, industrial designers are product designers envisioning, creating, and making things we use. Specifically, they blend art, business and engineering to create, solve problems, add value to our lives, and humanize the objects, processes, services and systems used every day by businesses and consumers. Not only are industrial designers responsible for the creation of beautiful objects, they create objects capable of eliciting emotional responses, directly affecting the quality of life and standard of living for many people throughout the world. —School of Art & Design, New Jersey Institute of Technology
Design is the most comprehensive and richest language on earth; it enriches your life, arouses your emotion and brings the world together. —Vivian Chang Wai Kwan
Industrial design is concerned with the appearance and usefulness of manufactured goods. When creating products, industrial designers think about technical performance, environmental concerns, human comfort, and aesthetics. —Industrial Design Program, University of Cincinnati
Design has become the public art of our time. —Steven Holt
Design is not so much about the end product as it is about the process. —Clement Mok
Industrial designers are concerned with the way people respond to objects, communicate with others, find pleasure, comfort and safety in activities, and overcome their physical and psychological limitations. Industrial designers are explorers of the values and richness of human knowledge and agents of change and integration, with a passion for cultural, economic, ecological, social, and symbolic value. —Industrial Design Program, Emily Carr University
Industrial designers are the specialists who determine the features, appearance, materials and ergonomics of many products we use daily – from toasters and cell phones to sporting goods and tools. Industrial designers play a vital role on product development teams to ensure the connection between a product and its end user. —Industrial Design Program, Carlton University
By developing products that are innovative, useful, safe, aesthetically appropriate, ecologically sound and socially beneficial, the industrial design profession serves the needs of society, consumers, manufacturers and the environment. —Arizona State University, Design School
Design is a way to understand the world and how you can change it. —Design Museum, London
Design has an important task: to resolve problems, to offer better solutions, to save, and add value to our lives. Development of a new product should always “make sense” in these terms. — Kristiina Lassus
The pursuit of design is not about the way things appear but rather about the way things have meaning and how these things add or detract from the human experience. —Rob Forbes
Today, design lifts everyday objects with form and colors out of the ordinary in a provocative manner. However, innovation takes place only when material and technology enable intuitive operation, and when the products appeal to the soul of man. —Joachim H. Faust
Innovation is only meaningful when it enhances the human experience. Too many times, in both the worlds of product design and architecture, the designer and architect forget that in the final analysis, it’s about the user. —Sam Farber
The urge for good design is the same as the urge to go on living. The assumption is that somewhere, hidden, is a better way of doing things. —Harry Bertoia
Design, like music, is a deeply human endeavor that on occasion, breaks through the cacophony to communicate on a highly emotional level. —Chee Pearlman
Design is one of the most typical art forms of our time (as well as fashion, photography, music, cinema…). The Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo has called them ‘commercial arts,’ meaning that, opposite from the classic arts, they need the consent of the public. —Alberto Alessi
Design is one of the most forceful influences on behavior and is a part of everything we human beings experience… It’s this connection between design, emotion, and behavior that gives design its power. —Penny Bonda
It is always important to me that a product does not just exist in the here and now, but that it shows a way into the future. —Florian Hufnagl
Designers may be the true intellectuals of the future. —Paola Antonelli
Every facet of the design process has to maintain a relationship with the senses. When you confront an object, you’ve got to touch it, smell it, listen to it. —Bruno Munari
Design is not beautification. It’s a thought process: a non-linear, spatial way of thinking in which connections are made between seemingly unrelated things. —Sohrab Vossoughi
Good design isn’t about making things work better anymore. It’s about making you feel engaged with the present. —Sam Jacobs
Marketing asks the questions, design provides the answers. —Carl Gustav Magnusson, FIDSA
Design is the patterning and planning of any act toward a desired, foreseeable end… any attempt to separate design, to make it a thing-by-itself works, counter to the fact that design is the primary underlying matrix of life. —Victor Papanek, IDSA
Design is about evoking emotions that showcase a unique signature, apart from merely providing solutions to problems. —Tony Thomas Narikulam