Industrial design  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Revision as of 13:56, 10 October 2017

Olivetti Valentine, designed by Ettore Sottsass, first released on Valentine's Day 1969

A huge iron and glass building, The Crystal Palace was one of the wonders of, if not the world, Britain. A rebuilt and expanded version of the building that originally housed the Great Exhibition of 1851, it stood in Sydenham from 1854 until 1936, and attracted many thousands of visitors from all levels of society. The name "Crystal Palace" was coined by the satirical magazine Punch. Today, it symbolizes modern architecture, the rise of consumer culture and the start of industrial design.

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Industrial design is an applied art whereby the aesthetics and usability of products may be improved for marketability and production. The role of an industrial designer is to create and execute design solutions towards problems of engineering, marketing, brand development and sales.

The rise of industrial design is illustrated by The Crystal Palace (illustration, right).

History

The first use of the term "industrial design" is often attributed to the designer Joseph Claude Sinel in 1919 (although he himself denied this in interviews), but the discipline predates 1919 by at least a decade. Christopher Dresser is considered the world's first Industrial Designer. Industrial design's origins lie in the industrialization of consumer products. For instance the Deutscher Werkbund, founded in 1907 and a precursor to the Bauhaus, was a state-sponsored effort to integrate traditional crafts and industrial mass-production techniques, to put Germany on a competitive footing with England and the United States.

The earliest use of the term may have been in The Art Union, A monthly Journal of the Fine Arts, 1839.

“Dyce’s report to the Board of Trade on foreign schools of Design for Manufactures. Mr Dyces official visit to France, Prussia and Bavaria for the purpose of examining the state of schools of design in those countries will be fresh in the recollection of our readers. His report on this subject was ordered to be printed some few months since, on the motion of Mr Hume.”

“The school of St Peter, at Lyons was founded about 1750 for the instruction of draftsmen employed in preparing patterns for the silk manufacture. It has been much more successful than the Paris school and having been disorganized by the revolution, was restored by Napoleon and differently constituted, being then erected into an Academy of Fine Art: to which the study of design for silk manufacture was merely attached as a subordinate branch. It appears that all the students who entered the school commence as if they were intended for artists in the higher sense of the word and are not expected to decide as to whether they will devote themselves to the Fine Arts or to Industrial Design, until they have completed their exercises in drawing and painting of the figure from the antique and from the living model. It is for this reason, and from the fact that artists for industrial purposes are both well paid and highly considered (as being well instructed men) that so many individuals in France engage themselves in both pursuits.”

The practical draughtsman's book of industrial design: was printed in 1853

See also

• The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
• Recorded culture
• Mass production
• Modern design
• Modernist design
• Design
• Raymond Loewy
• Form follows function
• Danish design