Rob,
I agree that companies are employing more industrial designers. Would you
also agree that the use of the skills of an industrial designer are a
necessary but not sufficient for the development of successful consumer
products. As you alluded to, large companies that make their business in
the consumer domain are effective by employing a large cast of characters,
not just designers, and not just engineers. I'm sure you've also seen the
trend that companies are now higher more cultural anthropologists to
support their new product development efforts. Doing what is know to those
of us in the design community as Needfinding, these classically train
anthropologists are making huge inroads into the product development
teams. In my mind what distinguishes these professional anthropologists
from designs is that while anthropologists are trained as objective
observers seeking to understand and report, designers are trained to
understand and then utilize this understanding to intervene, shifting the
context of the user through what ever product/service the designer helps to
create and deploy.
Though I do have to concede that in my own classical engineering education,
I have actively sought opportunities to build my design skills and
awareness. But I have also sought out business and art courses. Is
designer the name we give to those that amass skills from multiple
domains? Colleagues and I have toyed with using bricoleur but the European
view of this term kept us from adopting it to describe this Jack/Jane of
all trades related to the creation of successful and compelling products.
John
At 01:53 PM 11/21/2003 -0500, Rob Curedale wrote:
>John Feland:
>
>I think Rob raised a few eyebrows with this comment...
>
> >People with purely art or engineering backgrounds usually do not design
> >commercially successful consumer products.
> >-Rob Curedale
>
>Though Einstein didn't produce any commercially viable products, there are
>countless examples of engineers that have designed successful
>products. One that immediately springs to mind is Lonnie Johnson, inventor
>of the wildly successful SuperSoaker watergun. (www.supersoaker.com)
>Lonnie is a trained aerospace engineer and a noted expert in fluid
>dynamics. You can find out more about him at
>http://www.johnsonrd.com/net/index.htm.
>
>I don't agree that there are countless examples of engineers designing
>successful consumer products in the world today. Large consumer product
>companies usually have industrial designers designing there products and
>engineers engineering their products. Companies like HP and Microsoft
>wouldn't employ industrial designers unless they thought that they helped
>sell their products. Einstein didn't design products. He did play the
>violin and may have been a good person to teach or develop curiculum at a
>music school. There is a trend for more companies to use industrial
>designers. My statement was a deliberately provocative one.
>
>______________________________
>
>R o b C u r e d a l e
>Professor, Chair Product Design
>College for Creative Studies Detroit
>201 East Kirby
>Detroit MI 48202-4034
>
>Phone: 313 664 7625
>Fax: 313 664 7620
>email: [log in to unmask]
>http://www.ccscad.edu
>______________________________
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