History of Industrial and Product Design

Industrial design history traces the design of mass-produced goods from the mechanisation of manufacture in the nineteenth century to contemporary consumer products.

Definition

The history of industrial and product design is the study of how mass-produced goods have been conceived, styled, and manufactured since industrialisation, and of the profession that mediates between manufacture and consumption.

Scope

This topic covers the rise of industrial design as a profession, the division of labour between designer and maker, styling and streamlining, the postwar consumer boom, the influence of corporate design management, and shifts from Fordist mass production to flexible and globalised manufacturing. It examines how form, function, materials, marketing, and obsolescence interact in mass-produced artefacts.

Core questions

• How did the separation of design from manufacture create the industrial designer's role?
• What relationship holds between styling, function, and selling in mass-produced goods?
• How did streamlining and planned obsolescence shape twentieth-century consumer products?
• How have globalisation and digital manufacture changed product design?

Key theories

Design and the mechanisation of production

Heskett situates industrial design in the long transition from craft to mechanised mass production, treating the designer as a response to the problem of giving form to goods made by machine for anonymous markets.

Objects, desire, and consumption

Forty argues that the form of mass-produced goods is shaped less by neutral function than by the need to make commodities desirable, embedding social aspirations and ideologies in everyday objects.

History

Industrial design coalesced as a profession in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s, when consultants such as Raymond Loewy and Henry Dreyfuss applied styling and streamlining to consumer goods. Postwar reconstruction, the spread of corporate design departments in Europe and Japan, and late-twentieth-century globalisation successively reshaped the field, which now spans branding, sustainability, and digital products.

Debates

Styling versus functional design

Whether industrial design's core contribution is rational problem-solving and ergonomics or the commercially driven styling and obsolescence that critics charge with manipulating consumers.

Key figures

• John Heskett
• Adrian Forty
• Penny Sparke
• Raymond Loewy
• Henry Dreyfuss

Seminal works

• heskett1980
• forty1986
• sparke2013

Frequently asked questions

When did industrial design become a profession?

It emerged distinctly in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s, when independent consultants such as Raymond Loewy and Henry Dreyfuss built practices around styling and improving the appeal of mass-produced goods.

What is streamlining?

Streamlining is an interwar styling idiom of smooth, tapered, aerodynamic forms applied to products from cars to refrigerators; it signalled speed and modernity and is a central episode in industrial design history.