Product Design

The industrial and product design elective — how a designer designs an object, a household tool, a piece of furniture, an industrial product, so that it is useful, usable, well-made and inclusive. It is the interior programme's furniture and materials thinking taught from the object's point of view, and it is honest about what design is and is not. Its first correction is the whole spirit of the course: product design is the integration of form, function, use and making, and it is not styling. Good design, in Dieter Rams's ten principles, is innovative, useful, aesthetic, understandable, honest, unobtrusive, long-lasting, thorough to the last detail, environmentally friendly and as little design as possible, which he summed up as less, but better, and which means cutting away everything that does not serve the function rather than adding ornament for its own sake. Design begins by justifying the need, asking what problem is being solved and for whom, not by drawing a pleasing shape, because a beautiful answer to no real question is waste. It teaches human factors, or ergonomics, as fitting the product to human abilities and limits, using anthropometry for the range of real people rather than a mythical average, because the human is part of the system and humans err, so a good product prevents error where it can and forgives it where it cannot. It shows that a good product tells you how to use it, through Don Norman's affordances, the actions an object makes possible by its form, and signifiers, the cues that show where and how to act, with feedback that confirms an action and natural mapping that lays controls out to match what they control, so that the door you push when you should pull is understood as a design failure and not a user failure, and a product that needs an instruction label to be operated has already failed. It insists that displays match the task, a precise digital number for an exact value and a qualitative analog dial or status light for a glance, a trend or a check, with visual codes and symbols that are standard, consistent and never colour alone. It treats form and colour as carriers of meaning and emotion that nonetheless serve function, and material and technology as choices made for function and for recyclability, repair and end of life together, because a product that cannot be repaired or recycled is a design failure and design for disassembly is the honest choice, while feasibility for production and design for manufacture decide whether a good idea can become a real, affordable object. And it ends in design exercises, from a spoon and a chair to a watch dial and a headlight, and above all in inclusive product design, the design of things for the physically and differently abled, illustrated by the OXO Good Grips peeler that Smart Design created for a founder's wife with arthritis and that turned out to be a better tool for everyone, whose deepest lesson is to avoid stigma, because a tool labelled as being for people with arthritis shrinks its own audience. Throughout, a product is treated as an honest answer to a real human need, made to be used, made to be made, and made for everyone.