- Greetings, everyone.
So we've talked about a variety of design disciplines
in the introductory lecture to this module.
Today, we'll talk about one specific one
referred to as industrial design.
(bright music)
Industrial design,
which is also referred to as product design
essentially refers to the creation of consumer goods.
And this could be everything from the smallest spoon
that you can think about to the largest machine.
Let's take an example.
Let's take an example of something like a toothbrush.
Now, a toothbrush, as you see in this specific example,
here you see a very generic kind of a toothbrush.
The packaging is very generic. It's just a plastic bag.
The toothbrush, as I will take this out,
the toothbrush itself is also very generic.
It's essentially a transparent toothbrush
with very little specifics
on how one holds it, what it does.
So one might refer to this as an archetypal product.
It's one example of what a toothbrush could look like.
If you think about beauty, utility, and sustainability,
those are three things that we worry about as designers,
and look at the market.
So you might be hard pressed
to find something like this in the marketplace.
It would be difficult to find
a toothbrush that looks exactly like this.
However, you will find a range of toothbrushes
with different shapes, different forms,
different kinds of grips, different colors.
You might find a variation on these bristles,
some with larger bristles, some with smaller bristles,
some with hard, medium, or soft bristles.
So what happens with design
is that designers look at people's needs.
Brushes designed for children, brushes designed for adults.
So what happens is that depending upon people's needs,
depending upon what aesthetics we are looking for,
what kind of ergonomics we need,
designers come up with a range of variations on the idea.
So while this is a very generic simple toothbrush,
what you actually find in the marketplace
is something that's a lot more various.
You will find a range of different kinds of toothbrushes
in the marketplace.
So in a sense, what design does is exactly that:
it looks at people's needs
and converts those needs into products
that people can use on a daily basis.
There's a definition for industrial design
and this is one definition from the IDSA,
or the Industrial Designers Society of America,
And they define design as you see on the screen
as the professional service of creating products and systems
that optimize function, value, and appearance
for the mutual benefit of both user and manufacturer.
So let's unpack this a little bit.
Let's look at some of the specifics of this definition.
So it's a professional service,
which means that you can get a degree in industrial design,
you can work as an industrial designer,
you can get a job as an industrial designer.
What does it create?
It creates products and systems.
Now the word product we all understand.
It's tangible goods like the toothbrush that we just saw,
but it also talks about systems.
Very often, products do not exist in a vacuum.
Products are essentially components of larger systems.
So a toothbrush goes hand in hand with toothpaste
which sits on a sink.
It might sit on a toothbrush holder.
So there is a series of other artifacts, other products,
that this product relates to.
The largest system also includes
all the people involved in making it,
all the people involved in recycling it.
So every product exists in a larger system
and very often designers are involved,
not in the creation of just that one product,
but the entire system as well.
So what does this product and system do?
It optimizes function, value and appearance.
We've talked about the notion of beauty, utility,
and sustainability before as the key goals of design.
Here, the term value is important.
What does value mean?
Essentially, it brings something of value
to the people who are involved.
So if you are a child, you want a toothbrush
that brings you value as a child,
something that you can hold, something that's fun,
something that has maybe a shape of an animal on it.
All those things bring value to that specific user group.
And it's for the benefit
of who the user and the manufacturer.
So who are we designing for
and how will the design come to market?
I would like to add something to this definition.
What's missing here is the notion of sustainability.
As we create products
for the mutual benefit of the users and the manufacturers,
we also need to think about the impact on the environment.
Why don't we say that we design products
that are of value to both the user, the manufacturer,
and to the planet as well.
So let's extend this definition of industrial design
to say that industrial design is a service
of creating new products and systems that benefit people,
that benefit manufacturers, that benefit corporations,
but also benefit the planet on which we live.
So that could be one definition of industrial design.
So let's look at an example.
Let's understand what industrial design is
through an example.
So you've seen several chairs.
This is a very simple wooden chair on which you can sit,
could be a dining chair, could be a side chair,
but you also have seen chairs like these.
This is a folding chair that you can take outside,
that you can sit outside of your lawn or in your yard.
This is another kind of chair that could be used in a cafe,
could be used where you have a dining table
and lots of people that might be sitting together.
You could take this chair to the beach,
this is a reclining chair that also folds up.
So you can see that while the action of sitting
is standard across people,
the contexts in which the sitting takes place,
whether it's at the beach or whether it's an office
or whether it's at home,
all those contexts then determine the nature of the design.
It determines what the shape of the chair's like.
It determines what materials it is made out of.
It determines all these other aspects
of what that artifact looks like,
how it is manufactured, how it is used, et cetera.
So these are the kinds of things
that we have to keep in mind
as industrial designers, as product designers.
Let's take a specific example of a chair
which is designed by a company called Herman Miller,
and this chair is called the Embody chair.
What you're seeing in this image
is the back view, side view, and front view of this chair.
So this is a task chair.
Essentially, it's been designed for people
who might be working in an office,
sitting at a computer all the time,
who might spend eight, nine,
or even longer hours in the workplace.
Of course, it can be used at home as well,
but the primary application of this chair
is to be used in an office sort of environment.
So let's look at this idea of this chair
from the three perspectives that we've talked about:
the notion of beauty, the notion of utility,
and the notion of sustainability.
So we've talked about this before.
If these are the three things that designers think about,
how can we apply those to the concept of this chair,
to this Embody chair.
How did it come into being?
Now, if you look at the kinds of products
that Herman Miller has created as its repertoire,
it is a whole series of products.
You can see the lineup
of the Herman Miller chairs in front of you.
The blue one that you see at the end, this chair,
this is the Embody chair.
Now, one of the things
that the designer was thinking about
is the notion of allowing the aesthetics,
allowing the shape, allowing the beauty of the chair
to emerge through the design process.
So as they focused on things like ergonomics,
as they focused on things of human comfort,
they thought about how do people
who sit on a computer all day,
how do they behave, how do they move?
As they thought of those things,
the shape, the form of the chair emerged.
So it is an emergent process.
And this chair took on its form
based upon all the process of design
that the designers were going through.
Let's look at the notion of utility as well.
So one of the things that the designers set out to do
from the very beginning was this notion of comfort.
How can we make this chair comfortable
for long periods of time
when someone is sitting in that chair?
What you traditionally see on chairs is cushions.
You see very often in a task chair,
or in a chair that one might use in an office,
you might see thick pads of foam, right?
So this foam essentially is the one
that is allowed to compress.
It gives you comfort so as you sit in the chair,
there's a certain compression, there's certain give,
and it provides you some comfort.
This chair, this Embody chair, takes a different approach.
There is no foam in the seat,
there's no form in the back of the chair.
And so what you see here is what Herman Miller has created
what they refer to as pixelated support.
So you see each of these sections,
each of these hexagonal regions,
are independently moveable of each other.
So what this chair does
is that it is able to shift and move
depending upon the individual that sits in it.
So what Herman Miller did over long periods of time
is they did lots of ergonomic studies.
They created what I refer to as pressure maps.
They saw how people sat.
They saw where the pressure comes from.
They mapped out these variations on how people sit
and that led to the design of this system
in which the individual pixels
as it were on this chair can move,
thereby providing maximum comfort.
So you're able to get a significant amount of comfort
in the seat without having to have any form of a cushion.
'Cause one of the things that a cushion does
is it cuts back breathability,
and so what this chair is able to do
is without a cushion, it gives the support,
it gives the give, but also is able to allow
some certain amount of breathability.
If you look at the back of the chair,
you can see that there's a form of a branching structure.
So you can see this is one large area.
It branches into this, then branches into this
and branches into something, gets smaller,
and that gets even smaller further down.
So what this kind of structure does to the chair,
again, it gives it flexibility.
So as you lean back in this chair,
it's able to move, it's able to flex,
and it's able to respond to the movements of the human body.
So if you think of the utility of this chair,
if you think of how the company has thought
about the notion of comfort,
how they thought of the notion of ergonomics,
it has created an extremely comfortable chair
that provides the possibility of sitting in it
over extended periods of time
without causing any health damage
to people who are sitting in the chair.
So this is one key part
of the utility of this device, of this product.
And finally, let's think of sustainability.
So Herman Miller is a company that has been thinking
about sustainability and environmental impact
of their products for a very long time.
Let's look at some of the statistics of this chair.
So this chair, the Embody chair,
as this diagram shows, is 95% recyclable.
So at the end of its life, you can take it apart.
It comes with a set of instructions
on how to take the chair apart,
and these individual parts of the chair,
95% of those of those parts can be recycled.
So you can see a breakdown of the materials.
It has 38% steel, which is totally recyclable.
Most metals can be recycled over and over again.
It has 38% of plastic,
aluminum, textile, foam,
and 1% of other materials
that are not classified in this diagram.
So what you see here is a concern for the environment.
What you see here is that
at the end of the life of this chair,
it just doesn't end up in a landfill,
but it actually can be taken apart
and only 5% of it doesn't come back into the system again.
The rest of the chair
can actually come back into the system,
therefore, minimizing the total amount of waste
that goes out into the world.
And then another thing to think about with this chair
is that the chair, in addition to being 95% recyclable,
42% of the chair, almost half of the chair,
is made from recycled materials to begin with.
So the recycled content breaks down into 28% post-consumer
and 14% pre-consumer recycled content.
So you can see that in thinking about this chair,
the company Herman Miller has thought about
what can we do from a design perspective,
what can we do from the perspective of sustainability
to make sure that this chair doesn't increase
bad environmental impacts, but actually takes into account
what can we do as designers to cut down
some of the impacts on the environment.
So what we've seen here in this presentation
through the simple example of this chair
is that industrial design thinks of consumer goods
like toothbrushes, like chairs, like cars, et cetera,
but again, thinks have three important things:
thinks of the beauty of things,
thinks of the utility of things,
and thinks of sustainability.
So this one quick example of a chair
should give you some idea of what designers think about
and what they create at the end of the design process.
Thank you.