many have asked me what is it that i do (well not me in general but industrial designers… coz basically i do nothing).. anyway i was browsing thru some papers i kept from my schooling days… and i found this article …and i discovered that it was taken from core77.com…
Taken from http://www.core77.com/design.edu/rain001.asp
What is ID and why should I care?
by N. Rain Noe
“If I could design anything, the world would be a very different place.
I’d make paper towel dispenser handcranks a little lower, so that water didn’t trickle down my arm when I crank out the paper. I’d specify a heat-retaining ceramic for my toilet seat to be made out of, and I’d design a small refrigerant device for my pillow to circumvent the need to flip it over to find the cool spot. I’d design condoms with a little bump on one side of the ring so that I can distinguish sides in the dark; I’d design an alarm clock with a moving snooze button that would be an easy target the first time I hit it, then become harder to locate after each attempt; and I’d design rings with round edges so that they didn’t dig into bar soap and get clogged up with slivers of Irish Spring when I wash my hands.
We here at CORE represent Industrial Designers. Our job is to design products–anything and everything that’s mass-produced, from Ferraris to toasters, from furniture to television sets. Industrial Designers dream up products through drawings, sketches, renderings, even doodles, presenting to the manufacturing client their vision of what a certain product should look like.
The inside of an industrial designer’s sketchbook usually looks like some kind of flattened and compressed mad scientist’s laboratory, filled with doodles of various types of products and, occasionally, futuristic objects–two-dimensional dreams slated to be transformed into three-dimensional realities. Industrial designers also create ideas with their hands, using studio materials like clay and modeling foam to show what a product should feel like.
Michelangelo “discovered” his sculptures inside blocks of marble; industrial designers find the shape of the latest walkman inside a chunk of clay, or foam, or occasionally a computer-driven substitute, like the Alias rendering software used to create the special effects for such movies as Terminator 2 and The Mask. Whatever the studio material may be, designers may spend hours at a time molding it, forming it, adding different textures to it, touching and holding it to see what it feels like, carving and re-carving the lines that will soon be an actual working product, touched and held by millions of users.When you pop a brand-new product out of the box and touch it, the designer’s hands and eyes have already ran over the surface, in one way or another, hundreds of times.
I think our goal as a profession is
1) to make the product attractive
2) to make the product not be a pain in the neck.
I say the latter because if you think about it, nobody wants a toaster, or an iron, or an ironing board. What people want is toast, and pressed shirts. You want a bunch of things to happen in your life, like clean hair, good music, and for your friends to able to leave you messages when you’re not home, and so you have to put up with shampoo bottles, a stereo, and an answering machine (all of which are designed). These products can be a bunch of stodgy crap that clutters up your apartment, or a hyper-cool collection of objects that subtly enhance your life; the difference is in the way they’re designed, in the way they look and feel.
Some products look and feel, well, cool (check out AT&T;’s latest “wavy” cordless phone, one of the first that doesn’t look like it was designed on an etch-a-sketch), and work well; the designer spent time with the product, refining the lines, testing the functionality.
Other products have annoying qualities that nearly outweigh their usefulness, like coffee tables with corners that draw blood and remote controls that look like maps of Manhattan. The reason that companies keep making these poorly designed products . . . is because people keep buying them. I think that people’s unawareness of design forces them to continue purchasing crappy stuff because they don’t realize that there’s an alternative. They don’t realize how ugly the product looks in the context of their home and that they’re having a lousy time using the product. If you just let the clock blink 12:00 on your VCR because you’re intimidated by the Star Trek button display, if you’ve ever had your finger bitten by a garbage can with a “bear-trap” spring-loaded lid, if you’ve ever cradled a cordless phone between your face and shoulder and accidentally pressed several buttons with your cheek, then you have an inkling of what we’re talking about.
As long as people keep purchasing products like that, as long as people seem not to care about and be aware of what their place looks like and works like, the world will remain filled with ugliness, and things that don’t work properly–staplers that require bomb-defusing concentration to reload, lamps that burn your hand when you shut them off, and ambivalent condoms.”
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i guess that the article explains what we do quite well, many people tend to think that designers draw pretty pictures to look good, many think that its easy to come up with something new. i read paul’s blog often, andt pains me to see when people complain abt how certain cars look. wait, its okay to complain or voice out your distaste about a certain vehicle. but when it comes to bashing the designers or whatever, i feel sad, sad because people tend to think lightly about designing, but if i were to ask you to design a table, more often then not, you’ll still draw a rectangular shape with 4 legs, or maybe it will be different, say an amoeba shape with 3 legs thus making it look different, but the question is , will it be a practical table? design is a fine balance between funtionality and aesthetics. Or at least that’s what i believe it is.
itsdree 