Can we visualize a new kind of Industrial Design education – called for a bit “Digital Industrial Design Education”?
Where the process of design is:
1. Primarily digital – so its not then about hand drawing, or workshop practice.
2. Independent of ‘manufacturing’ priorities – and so is significantly ‘form’ and ’shape’ orientated.
3. Similar to graphic design in that it lives in the computer environment.
4. Similar to set and ‘fantastic’ object design – like design is for Syd Mead and the other designers who do not take current reality as a constraint.
Do you think such a picture is scary or soul-less? But keep this thought in your mind for a bit and then speculate on the good things that can be done in design with this orientation.
Would you like to see a program in Digital Industrial Design?
8 Comments
November 22, 2008 at 4:08 am
Design has acquired many prefixes and industrial and digital are the popular ones amongst these prefixes. Design is about the creation of future realities that are both desirable as well as viable. Some of these realities would indeed be digital in nature while others would remain tangible and rooted in our material reality.
Digital is a medium for design exploration, visualisation and in the game and interface domains it is a reality all of its own. Digital is in these domains a material as well as an environment and we can therefore imagine a field of specialisation that would focus on digital as a material as well as a medium of existence.
November 23, 2008 at 8:55 am
I think this is a pretty interesting point of discussion and I think there are a few factors to be considered.
First, the practice of training people to simply create interesting form is not uncommon however it is most frequently seen for things like the video game industry, not industrial design per se. There are many programs teaching, concept art, digital media, etc. with the intention of creating people who can come up with really new ideas for things. These kinds of people are seldom used to make designs that are actually used in the real world, however, people like them in the past have of course been the shaping force for many of the technologies and end products we see now. This is interesting because it means that there are people who are experienced in writing SciFi and drawing crazy pictures of floating cars and so forth, and a number of years later the real world implements these end points or people embark on research to achieve the kinds of things that they have been introduced to in past media. I am sure you are aware of this I just think it leads to an interesting situation.
The point of interest here is that despite the fact that many new movies and SciFi experiences have existed in the past few years, there are not so many revolutionary technologies being showcased, especially not ones that we can not either currently mimic or conceivably mimic in the near future. One example of this is the gestural interface system used in the movie Minority Report. At the time it was considered new and cool technology however only a few years later the best selling phone on the market implements a similar idea, the US election coverage also uses gestures and large touch surfaces and recently MIT announced that they had a working model of this system in 1997 – before the movie even came out. What I am getting at is that 20 years ago everyone had something to look forward to when it came to future technology. Now the future is here and we still only have a limited model or comprehension of what we are hoping with happen next.
Kevin Kelly and a number of other writers and thinkers have contributed to a conclusion which suggests that technology will not be the development of most value in the coming years but instead that the mash ups and integration of existing and near technologies, to provide better experiences and fundamentally new product systems, will be our flavour of progress, and also will be a tool to enrich social interactions and systems. This is to say, the future of designing technology may be really designing ways to build more valuable social experiences.
I think this is relevant because I think people can be trained to contribute to this situation, especially industrial designers. Hence, I think if it were the intention of a group to design a school to create better future designers they would look closely at creating people who can lever social understanding, technological awareness, and creative passion, with a hope that they would be able to eventually provide relevant solutions and innovative experiences. Form is important for this market but I think there is a lot more than just form knowledge which is needed.
On a completely alternative track of thought, I think it is accurate to say that more and more design schools are creating output which is not product or even form based. This causes me some sadness as I think there is a world of value in beautiful things and things that just make people happy, because of their great design. It is not that I think things are no longer well designed, but I think that the part of them that is well designed is not really their form as often as it is some other aspect. I think the designers doing this are important, but yes, it would be great to have accessible people who can also provide great insight into form. If this were the case however, I think I would try to make these so called Digital Industrial Designers, valuable in a way that Concept Artists are not. That is to say, I think there are skills that a designer should have that are not found in either a “design thinker” or stylist or concept artist. Specifically, this is to do with integrating skills and having ways to make use of output. I think designers really benefit from having field experience in making things and interacting with people who make things for them (both manufacturing and prototyping), and I think that these skills are more important for people on the styling end of a project than the thinking end, in some respects at least.
Another factor here is of course that manufacturing is really changing. The buildings that were once the most expensive and extravagant (smooth designs and curved structures) are now really accessible due to the high end software and digital design that can occur and lead to fully pre cut parts. Allegedly Frank Gehry buildings are basically shipped as a Lego set with instructions and assembled very quickly onsite with limited or no local manufacture. This is also becoming the case with product design too, allowing for a different kind of communication between the designer and the maker. At the same time, however, Apple, one of the most well recognised design firms of this generation, concentrates almost exclusively on designing the most integrated solutions available. Without considering every aspect of all factors in their products they would probably not be able to reach such elegant design outcomes.
In both these cases, digital capability is of fundamental strength but I think more is required. Also, I think digital capability must be more than just producing designed things, I think it is a whole model for communicating and interacting. Blogging obviously is a great example of this but this alternative to traditional photoshop and cad also applies to things like the 3D Warehouse and SketchUp which now offers for remote collaboration on 3D projects for free. If digital designers are going to exist in this way, they need to be the people who can integrate various software and online tools to create real value and new solutions. Digital designers need to maintain contact with many of the aspects of the world that current designers do, they can just do it from a new vantage point, where a large portion of their work now takes advantage of the imbedded skills and specialisations that technology can offer.
I think this is not soul-less or scary, I think it sounds great
. I think there is increasing specialisation which allow for this to work but that will let the specialised layers of the design process be more general in other respects. In this way, while going increasingly digital I think a strong support of indented skill cultivation would be really valuable. Perhaps this is the act of separating the designer and the maker in the workplace but a designer who is not a doer is a strange, and potentially failed experiment. I think design thrives on reality. Blogs, social activity, skills enrichment, etc. all lead to increased value, in my opinion at least.
OK. Rants can go on forever. I will stop this one now. Not sure if this was what you were looking for, either way, let me know more I can do. I have also been thinking about a new school system recently. A bit different but your idea has generated further thinking.
November 23, 2008 at 9:39 am
Some really sophisticated thoughts there Mark.
And I will actually quote some of your text in the document I am preparing. Yes you captured the digital and the social nicely. So i a sense what I am writing is a 3 yr program which is primarily social – its an affirmative action university with a social mobility agenda – and then it will have sustainability. What I am aiming to take out is the ‘elitist’ side to design of ‘designing for the rich’ or moneyed class. Hence furniture for Milan types is out.
The UG program also looks to be a preparatory for the pg program in interaction design or service design.
November 24, 2008 at 12:37 pm
Sounds like an interesting idea – the first thing that popped into my head was a merging of Industrial Design & Interaction Design methodologies with the skills utilized in CAD and Web Development.
I question whether it would still have industrial design in the title? As industrial infers manufacturing and mass production in the context of the industrial revolution thus physical machines and manufacturing methods. It cannot be called graphic design, digital design or interaction design either.
I think hand drawing would still be central as you can utilize systems like wacom tablets and PC tablets to input data which require hand sketching skills.
I think it would be impossible for it to solely inhabit the digital world – how is it of value to someone? the current trends in digital mediums – especially web apps and social networking is making it applicable to the real world and bridging the two.
I don’t think it is scary or soulless – I think there are many unexplored possibilities in it and loads of potential. I think it is not just program of digital industrial design, I think it is almost a new discipline and that it would revolve very closely around internet based collaboration and the development of tools that allow access to a cloud computing platform/hub.
November 25, 2008 at 9:44 pm
There is an honesty to such a way of designing in that I think a lot of designers, educators and students feign a value of the “material” that has with the increased sophistication of digital parametric modeling and visualization all but vanished from the process of many learning design and many who do it as a commercial concern. Its vanished for one reason – digital I D is a very rapid way of developing, detailing and communicating form. So in this sense I think that is is actually quite a viable proposition for a program that has ‘form’ development and therefore product packages and enclosures as a central concern of its curricula. The service aspect is a bit murkier.
But it will not necessarily mean that what is designed is good design – or design that is contextually or technologically considerate – that will take something far more difficult to teach and to learn. Although it may seem counter intuitive it may make for a far more socially engaged educational space than the traditional modes of the sketch and model – it may be a strange Morlock type engagement but I imagine it would be dynamic – and it may be completely soulless – but that is where its power as an education in designing products and services may lie. Its dislocation from material arts traditions may bring a clarity of concept that is so easily made murky in the interpretive nature of design from arts education tradition.
hmm
November 26, 2008 at 8:09 am
I like that – the complete break that a plunge into technology offers. But yes a hefty dose of the social would be good. This works well with the character of Delhi and with the agenda of the university. I also see the digital as a way to address the issue of design outcomes being primarily orientated towards the magazines or galleries – but not sure how gets addressed.
November 28, 2008 at 11:43 am
I think this is about skipping some steps and embracing others. I think it is still largely industrial design but I think it is a new mythos of the field. I think the enabling changes are the shift in the industrial space to deal with rapid manufacture and custom systems, the shift in the web space allowing better collaboration and free tools of so many kinds, a shift in other software and technology, embracing fast and flexible engagement in productions and development, and a shift in the social space, giving rise to extensive existing digital data and a world where people think more interaction is better.
I think an important issue here is how social relevance can be generated and what the actual value of this interaction is. I think it is something between large scale data collection and very personalised interview. Like creating parametric thinking where social variables are what gives in significance and context. A methodology for developing social integration.
December 1, 2008 at 8:59 pm
Industrial design education – being thought or considered as
Digital Industrial Design education – Hmm
- All of these specific descriptors (adjectives) are each limiting the wider concept of the previous noun & thus idea- a bit like your pyramid both straight up and inverted
EDUCATION
DESIGN EDUCATION
INDUSTRIAL DESIGN EDUCATION
DIGITAL INDUSTRIAL DESIGN EDUCATION
- But while it is limiting it is also doing the function of taking the wide generic and focusing to a specific. This focus is the difference between an Education and the specialisation towards a social need?
- In this context I guess it becomes critical to decide which of these defining ‘limiters’ is the focus and see if the further ‘limiter’ is adding, digressing from or just defeating the moot focus
- If Industrial Design education were to be the original fulcrum then ‘digital Industrial Design education’ is about as narrowing (though currently relevant) as ‘Yoga Industrial design Education’ as both ‘Digital or Yoga’ is only the medium of the ‘realisation’ of the Industrial Design.
§ To illustrate the same point it may be like communicating the idea of vaccination for polio- which may happen by Radio ads, TV ads, posters, Street theatre or Oral tradition songs, to name a few. Calling this exercise a ‘Visual communication’ itself may defeat the medium to the target of relevance?
§ In defence of ‘Digital’ it is the medium which is currently most convenient, appropriate etc. and the need to be familiar and to excel in the medium is very valuable as long as it doesn’t exclude the plurality of media (-um vs a)
My current vector is more towards figuring out if this school is a ‘Medium’ specific education or ‘window’ specific and then take it from there- Medium has enormous relevance in determining the Window itself too..
I hope I haven’t just dotted the line between the cart and horse in its eternal cycle.