The Newer School

Industrial design as we know it has ended. Industrial design was the world of stylists who did important work in bringing art and emotion to product design. Now this is only one part of our profession. Maintaining a death grip on the cloistered world of colored markers and beautifully contrived ideation sketches diminishes the power of design.

Are we a profession that makes beautiful objet d’art with a principal aspiration to have curators of the Cooper-Hewitt and Vitra give us top billing in their ‘radical design’ exhibits? Or are we trying to make the world around us a more pleasant, joyful and wonderful place?  All the while earning money for our paying clients?

We are now a discipline that uses material science, engineering, psychology, ethnography, and data science with the same steady hand skills as compressed charcoal. The new generation of designers must reject one hundred ideation sketches as the benchmark for exploration. They must reject overwrought drawings that falsely project a progression from basic forms to finished product. This is old school.

The new school needs to execute designs that perform beautifully and embrace interdisciplinary collaboration with alacrity. We must make designs that don’t bleed a connoisseur’s watermark. Designs that surprise and instill wonder. Designs that satiate aesthetic needs, societal wants, and reflect an individual designer’s passion.

We live in a world of augmented reality, artificial intelligence, networked data and international communications. We must adjust radically while remembering our important legacy of creative exploration, visualization, communal work, critiques, and introspection.

In the new school of design, we need to richly engage emerging technology and sit at the feet of emerging industries. How many more toaster and desk lamp designs do we need? It is much more fun to develop attractive radii than read a paper on neural networks. But hard work and learning beyond the stylus is vital for professional designers.

Those who blend art and other disciplines advance evocative design expressions. They blend the sublime with the scream and the whimsical with the wonderful. There’s a lot more out there, let’s start exploring.