Are you a designer who wants to expand from 2D visuals to tangible 3D Products? Do you look at design blogs and feel there is a gulf between your skills and designing a physical product? It’s time you understood the principles of Industrial Design.

Here at Nollie, we want to demonstrate how you can use the 12 Principles of Multidisciplinary Design to further your creativity and diversify your skillset. 

Industrial Design is about designing goods and products for the market. One aspect of this is designing for Quantity and learning how to create work that can be multiplied over and over again without compromise.

In this article we’ll look at the techniques from Industrial Design you can incorporate into your larger design practice, from Prototyping to understanding how the user will interact with your work.

What is Designing for Quantity?

Designing for Quantity is one the 12 Principles of Interdisciplinary Design. It’s about creating multiple versions of your design, you’re designing for your item to be made several times using manufacturing. 

Compared to crafts where items are made individually, these items are produced at scale in large quantities. You’ll need to create designs that can be produced in large numbers without compromising on quality or functionality.

This Principle is strongly linked with Industrial Design as you’ll need to factor in all kinds of elements which will impact how easy your design will be to make. You’ll need to consider materials, manufacturing processes, and how people of all different sizes and shapes will interact with your item. How do you make it accessible for as many people as possible?

What is Industrial Design?

Industrial Design is the design field that best demonstrates how to design objects that are to be made in large quantities. For Interdisciplinary designers this will allow you to develop your 3D CAD skills and begin to develop tangible products that can be sold.

Industrial Design comprises of learning about users and understanding how to make one product work for a wide range of people with different needs and requirements.

You’ll need to factor in manufacturing, how will your design be produced, what materials will it be made from and create in a way that suits the machinery and production process.

Why Generalist Designers Should Learn Industrial Design?

As a generalist designer, you already have a broad skill set. But imagine adding industrial design techniques into your creative work.

It’s like unlocking a whole new level in your design journey! Industrial design teaches you skills like prototyping, CAD modelling, and understanding manufacturing processes. 

These skills not only complement what you already know but also add depth and versatility to your toolkit.

What are the Risks to Learning Industrial Design?

Only Surface-Level Understanding

Industrial Design is about balancing a whole range of topics, including manufacturing, user experience, and ergonomics. You might think that by learning only the basics of Industrial Design, you are only coming away thinking you cant develop a deep understanding.

Interdisciplinary Designers are able to use their skills from across the range of Design fields and begin to apply them to their work. The best way to learn from any Design Project is to engage in hands-on projects and getting feedback from people with more experience.

Time and Resource Investment

Learning more aspects to Industrial Design requires time and resources, possibly investing in courses and prototyping materials. For interdisciplinary designers, you’ll already be balancing multiple skill sets, and finding time and money might be a challenge.

We’ll expand more on Industrial Design topics, so if you want to learn more you can always keep up to date and keep track of interdisciplinary content with the Nollie newsletter.

Being an interdisciplinary Design comes from a love and passion for Design, and learning from and respecting the fields within it. Being interdisciplinary is about developing a growth mindset around your creative skills. 

The more you incorporate from the 12 Principles of Interdisciplinary design, the more you’ll be able to harness these areas of overlap and make work faster. 

What are the Benefits for Interdisciplinary Designers Learning from Industrial Design?

Holistic Perspective to Design

Industrial design emphasizes the integration of form, function, and usability. Learning industrial design can help interdisciplinary designers develop a more holistic perspective on design problems. 

You’ll be able to consider not only how to make things look good but also learn to design for ergonomics, usability, and manufacturability.

Expanded Skill Set

The point we keep making is that if you can design in one field of design, you have no idea how useful those skills will be when starting different styles of projects. 

By picking up skills from learning aspects of Industrial Design, you’ll be able to apply them elsewhere. Learning CAD modelling can help you to to apply that to Interior Design, Jewelry Design or even Motion Graphics. 

Industrial Design is focused on the user and building products that work for people. This is one of the best principles you can apply to other projects.

By building a large range of creative skills and techniques you’ll see the larger picture of how design interacts and open more opportunities for your career.

Easy Collaboration

As everything becomes more interconnected, you’ll be able to use your diverse skillset when collaborating with other creative professionals.

By learning Industrial Design you’ll be able to get a common knowledge that will allow you to understand and collaborate with engineers, marketers, manufacturers and other stakeholders.

The History of Industrial Design

Industrial Design as we know it came about from the Industrial Revolution that occurred in the 1900’s when we began to use factories to mass produce objects.

Prior to the Industrial Revolution, most of the objects found in people’s homes were made by artisans and craftspeople. Most items would be made to order from local workshops or at home. 

When the Industrial Revolution came, the advances in technology, machinery and production allowed things to be made cheaper and easier. Large volumes of objects could be made using production lines and standardised components.

At the time William Morris, an interdisciplinary designer and artist introduced the Arts and Crafts movement, arguing that mass produced objects had lost their beauty and were being designed without considering the customer, instead prioritizing profit.

The first recognised “Industrial Designer” was Peter Behrens, a German interdisciplinary designer (notice there’s a pattern here?) who was an architect, Industrial and Graphic Designer. He followed the architectural principle of “total control of a designed environment at all levels.” 

Behrens work became pioneering and his influence lead to Germany becoming a hub for Design,. His work inspired Walter Gropius, who went on to become the founder of the Bauhaus, arguably the best design school in history.  The Bauhaus was shut by the Nazi Party just shortly before World War 2.

Following World War 2, The United States became the hub of innovation and the epicenter for Industrial Design. In fact the term “Industrial Design” originates from the U.S. Patent Office in 1913.

The Americans would embrace Industrial Design to further the Capitalist goals of the time and grow as a superpower. The term Planned Obsolesence, making things become rubbish before they’re meant to, allowed the States to further the field of Industrial Design.

Meanwhile the post-war European countries embraced Industrial Design as a method to rebuild after the war, each developing their own styles and embracing their culture. 

Italy became renowned for Luxury, Germany focused on practical and functional design with designers like Dieter Rams, Switzerland showcased a neutral style that is still seen in modern Graphic Design. 

What Do I Need to Know?

The Power of Prototyping

Prototyping is part of the interactive design process. It involves making draft models of your idea to test out its functionality and form. Prototyping is about building 3D models from cardboard and craft materials to developing 3D prototypes that represent your idea to be pitched to manufacturers. 

Design is an iterative process. Your first idea is rarely your best. Prototyping allows you to develop your idea and explore how it works in a 3D space. 

With prototypes, the point is to try and explore your idea, making improvements to each model. At the beginning of a project you can make simple prototypes from cardboard and blue foam. 

As you progress through the project and the more improvements you make to your idea, the more you’ll see your final idea realise. Towards the end of the project your prototype should function and look almost indistinguishable from the final idea you want to pitch.

The more prototypes you make the more you can understand about how your product works. You can use other tools like 3D printing and model making to help you build your prototypes. 

A great example comes from James Dyson who made 5,127 prototypes over 5 years before completing his DC01 vacuum cleaner. This is an extreme example of making continuous improvements before finding your final solution. 

“So I started the process of developing a cyclone… That took 5,126 prototype failures before I got the 5,127th, which worked.”

— Sir James Dyson

Understanding how to prototype and incorporating it into your design process is great for interdisciplinary designers learning the 12 Principles of Interdisciplinary Design, and should become a vital part of your Development Stage in your Polymathic Process.

Design Semantics

The best designs should be so easy to use, that when you use it for the first time it feels instinctive. You might not even notice it because it’s so seamless.

Let’s say you buy a new phone, as soon as you open the packaging and you have it in your hand, you don’t grab the instructions. You just turn it on. How did you know how that button turned it on? This is brand new, you’ve never used it before but you already knew how to use it. How?

This type of thinking is called Design Semantics. It explains how you know whether to push a door or pull it, or how you know that you shouldn’t push that big red button. 

These are design semantics and they are little clues to the user that explains how to use your product. Look around you just now and there will be so many you can spot.

These little visual cues you can use to make things instinctively easy for the user of your product, and user experience is vital in making sure your project is successful. And speaking of User Experience…

Understand the User Experience

Lets go back to the new phone example, imagine if you tried to turn the volume down, but instead it changes the brightness. That’s not what you wanted. The designer of this phone hasn’t considered the user experience. 

Designers are not artists, our work is meant to be functional and practical not a display of emotions. If people don’t fully understand how to interact with your product, you’ve made a mistake.

When you’re creating new and innovative products that people might not have ever interacted with before, how do you ensure that they use your product as you intended? You need to consider the user experience. 

The best way to know how people will interact with your design is to watch people interact with your design. 

The more you consider the person who’ll be using your designs, and actually test your assumptions, the more functional your product will be. 

“Form Follows Function”

“Form Follows Function.” is a phrase coined by architect Luois Sullivan but has become adopted within many fields in Design, including Industrial Design. It has gone on to become one of the most recognised quotes by designers. I even have a badge with the phrase written on it!

What does it mean? It means that the aesthetics should come second to the performance of the solution. For industrial design, this means that firstly you should focus on the functionality of your design before going into Aesthetics. 

If you are designing a product, you need to consider the components inside and how they will be placed. The layout of the inner components, will give you a rough idea of the shape you can give the outer shell. 

Prioritise what the important elements that impact how your design will work, then design the aesthetics around that solution. 

3D CAD

Being able to use 3D CAD software is a great skill for interdisciplinary designers as it allows you to create in a 3D space, which will be very useful when working in other design fields, like Jewelry Design or Interior Design. 

3D CAD is a great tool for helping conceptualise your ideas. In Industrial Design, 3D CAD is used to help take your drawn sketches into something that works within a 3D space. 

3D CAD can be used visualise your idea, but you can make alterations in the software too, making it very useful during the Development stage of the Design Process.

Also 3D CAD software has several features that you can use to help you refine your idea. For example you can run simulations to understand how forces would impact your design, or you can measure the volume of the 3D model which you can use to understand how much material you’ll need, and allow you to make cost analysis from within the software.

For the best 3D CAD software, we recommend using Fusion 360. It’s free for personal use and companies who are earning less than $1000 a year.

Materials

Materials are to designers, what ingredients are to a chef. They play a hugely important role in determining the quality and properties of your final design. You’ll also have to factor in your material selection with costs, desired properties and finish. 

Depending on your design, you’ll need to select your materials to fit the brief and give a proper solution. 

Every material works differently, for example concrete works very differently from wood. Every wood has its own properties and attributes. Each material has certain ways of being manufactured too.

Like a chef, picking the freshest ingredients, you’ll need to select your materials that reflect the needs of your project but also determine which will help further the requirements of your project. 

Manufacturing & Assembly (DFMA)

Manufacturing plays a big role in Industrial Design and is why Industrial Design is linked to Designing for Quantity. Quantity is about creating multiple versions of the same thing. Designing for Manufacturing and Assembly is known as DFMA.

Manufacturing is about making your design from materials. The manufacturing process is unique to each design and is one important factor you’ll need to include when designing an Industrial Design project.

Depending on the materials you’ve selected for your design, it will impact the manufacturing. You’ll need to understand HOW your design will be made by meeting with manufacturers to ensure their idea is viable.

You’ll need to also understand how your parts fit together. This is known as assembly. How would you build your proposed design?

There are different manufacturing methods and we’ll go more into them in a later post.

Product Life Cycle

Understanding the Product Life Cycle is one aspect from Industrial Design that should be further enforced in other areas of Design. Luckily for you, you wee interdisciplinary designer, you’ll be able to take this technique and apply it to all kinds of design projects. 

The Product Life Cycle is exactly what you think. It’s the life cycle of your design, from its initial manufacture to its final end result. You have to factor in everything about your design and how it will end its cycle.

Right now we live in a disposable culture. We believe that the discarded disposable product’s life ends once it’s stuck in the bin. But depending on what your product is made from, this could still be the very early stages of the design’s life cycle. 

Lets use a disposable vape as an example. It lasts maybe a day or two, before being discarded. But when it’s put in the bin, it’s cycle isn’t over. Things don’t suddenly magically disappear once you’ve not got it anymore. It goes on a journey after that.

So where does it go? Depending on recycling in your area it might end there (if it’s made of the right material) but most likely it ends up in landfill. That disposable vape takes 1000 years to decompose. So you have a product that gets manufactured for 3 days of usage (max) out of 1000 years. Surely you can see how this is f*cking stupid, right? 

After decades of doing this, we suddenly found ourselves with oceans littered with plastic, plastic in the rain, and plastic even making its way into the human body. It’s pretty grim, but luckily new techniques in sustainability are allowing designers to create more consciously.

Sustainability

If that last topic got you riled up, then good. Now you’re paying attention. 

The truth of the matter is that Design is responsible for the mess we’re in. Who were the people putting the plastic in their products? It was designers.

On one hand, I sympathise with these designers. Nobody had any idea how bad things would get with plastic at the time. When plastic was introduced, it was revolutionary. It allowed easier transportation, with more durable materials that would last for years. This was great material for designers!

However, today, when we know how f*cked the planet is there really isn’t an excuse to not be looking for alternatives. And thankfully, this is the untapped market where designers can find their fortune.

Sustainability is a methodology to reduce the negative impact of your designs. It covers everything from material selection, to understand your carbon offset in the manufacturing, to coming up with ideas for repurposing your product after it’s finished it’s life cycle to create something else.

Thankfully, sustainable products are the new Gold Rush for designers (Green rush?). If you can come up with an idea that can reduce the negative impact of a traditional product you’ve made it. 

Just take Elon Musk, even if he has started leaning more towards Bond villian over the past few years, he has made a FORTUNE from sustainable technology like electric cars, reusable rockets and innovative ideas like Solar roof tiles, Starlink, and reducing traffic with the Hyperloop.

You can check out this post for more about sustainability. 

The Design Process

At Nollie, we are all about the transferable skills within Design. One skill that will massively help you become interdisciplinary is having a strong Design Process.

The Design Process can be adapted to fit different projects and having a strong understanding of how to use it will help you develop these transferable skills easier.

Brief Interpretation & Planning

The first stage of the Design Process is getting a brief. A brief is the document that explains the problem that you are required to fix with your design skills. It will have a list of things you are required to deliver at the end of the project and some insights into the client you’re working for.

Take the time to plan and organise your time. Being organised will allow you to control how much time you dedicate to different stages of the project and keep you on track. Set yourself deadlines by working backwards from the final deadline.

Begin looking at your Design Specification to understand the topics you need to learn in your Research Stage. 

Research

The Research Stage is vital for any new project to get yourself familiarised with the requirements of the brief. You can use the internet and books, but the most insightful research is to go out and meet experts and intended customers of the product you’re designing.

By going and meeting experts is a great way to build up a network in your area, and they can provide feedback throughout the project. People love to talk about what they know, and most often they will be happy to help you with your project.

The Research Stage is a great way to build up knowledge around a topic and once you understand how to use that research in your work, you’ll be able to apply this style of rapid learning to different interdisciplinary design projects.

Concepts

Now we get to the fun part, it’s time to start coming up with ideas and putting pen to paper. The concept stage is about generating as many different ideas as you can. You want these ideas to be drawn quickly so make them small.

You’re first idea is never your best idea, so make sure that you jot as many different concepts down. These thumbnail sized drawings you can then expand on and begin to develop.

Development

The Development Stage is about taking your idea from a drawing on a piece of paper to a final concept that you can bring to your client. 

Normally you’ll begin the development stage with a couple of your best ideas from the concept stage and then through prototypes and testing you can find a clear winner.

Prototypes play a big part in the Development Stage, by making prototypes you can see how your design will work in 3D space and understand how the user will interact with it.

The Development Stage is an amazing stage to the project as you can see your idea develop into something bigger. Your imagine starts to become realised.

Detail

Before sharing your final solution with your client, it’s always a good idea to tidy up any loose ends and create amazing renders and compile your research to ensure you know exactly how your design functions.

When it comes to your final pitch, you want to make sure there are no errors and the images used in your presentation are at the highest quality. 

When your presenting your work, you want to make sure everything is of the highest quality, so having time to fix and make any changes is going to be highly useful before your pitch.

Pitch

The pitch is the meeting between you and your client where you explain your design. You want to do everything you can to impress them.

Having a Design Specification is highly useful when it comes to pitching as you’ll have all the information you need. Use it to answer any questions the client may ask and always try to relate it back to your research if you can.

Promotion

Now you’ve completed the pitch, you might think that the project is over but your missing the final stage of any design project, Promotion.

Make it a habit at the end of every project to spend time adding it into your portfolio. Your portfolio is one the most important documents you’ll have as a designer and it’s what you send to potential clients when finding new work.

Your portfolio needs to be dynamic as most clients will only spend a few seconds looking at it, you need to draw there attention quickly.

Also you should upload your completed project to online platforms like Behance, Dribbble and on your own website. If you have an Adobe subscription, you’ll be able to build your own portfolio website with Adobe Portfolio. 

What Tools Do I Need for Industrial Design?

Design Sketchbook

Every Designer should have a sketchbook to draw out their ideas from the beginning to the end of a creative project.

You’re sketchbook is where you should be putting your ideas down through the Concept and Development stages of the Design Process. 

In the professional world, designers work with A3 size (tabloid for the Americans) paper sketchbooks, like this one. It allows you more space to explore your ideas and add annotation to explain your concepts.

Journal

A design journal is the most underrated tool for designers. A design journal should be used consistently and be used to keep track of project progress, your thoughts on the project, any tips or advice or meeting details. 

Also the more you use it, the more of an archive you’ll have of your design process. Which will show how much you’ve added to your design skills over the years. 

I’ve written before about the importance of keeping a journal and how to use one to help your design work. 

Also I recommend using a Bullet Journal, there’s no lines across the page so it’s better for sketches, it has small dots so you can make straight lines and diagrams and you can still write in a line if you choose. 

For Industrial Design, it also helps with drawing out measurements or simple orthographics.

Design Specification

A Design Specification (or Design Spec) is a tool used by designers to understand the larger context of the design and ensure your proposal successfully resolves the problem you’re trying to solve.

In a Design Specification there’s a list of factors that will impact your design and it’s up to you to provide specific answers for each. These factors include the products performance, it’s aesthetics, it’s target demographic and sizes. 

If you were writing a Design Specification, you should aim to answer the prompts with as much detail as possible, for example in the Sizes section, you would write that the design must be 300mm rather than writing the design is pretty small. Use numbers and expert research to understand to fill your Design Specification.

A Design Specification is an evolving document that is worked on throughout a design project. You would begin writing your Design Spec at the beginning of a project and gradually add more specific details as the project goes on. 

Adobe Creative Cloud

Having an understanding of Adobe Creative Cloud is essential to becoming a professional designer. It is the industry standard, and employers expect you to have an understanding of the software. 

Also having Adobe makes it easier to pick up interdisciplinary design skills, as the package includes 15 pieces of software that you can use to enhance your creative projects. But most importantly, you’ll need:

Photoshop

Photoshop is a tool that allows users to manipulate images and text to create visual designs. In industrial design, it is used for mood boards, product renders, and concept exploration.

Having an understanding of Photoshop, and Adobe’s products in general, will be a great way to develop interdisciplinary skills. You can use the same techniques within other areas of design and it is a great transferable skill that will open more creative doors.

Photoshop is such a vital tool for Designers, and the impact it’s had within the creative industry, has meant that “Photoshop” has become a verb used to describe any modified image. 

Illustrator

Adobe Illustrator is another great tool for Industrial Design and another vital software that should be understood by interdisciplinary designers. 

Illustrator is used in Industrial Design to create precise vector drawings, something that is essential for detailed components and visualising your product concepts.

You can turn your sketches into vectors easily, and then transfer them into Fusion 360 to use as a base for your 3D model. 

Illustrator is a great visual tool for designers and allows you to refine visual elements before taking it into more complex 3D software. 

At Nollie, we have managed to get you a cheeky discount on Adobe, you can find out more here.

Fusion 360

Autodesk’s Fusion360 is a 3D CAD software that is built for designers in this area. It’s also free for personal use and for start-ups. 

Fusion 360 is a great 3D CAD software and one that we recommend for interdisciplinary designers. It allows you to create parts and adjustable 3D models that you can modify and refine during the design process.

Fusion 360 allows designers to bring all separate parts together to create an Assembly model. Allowing you to see how all the parts fit together and check for any changes.

Fusion 360 is dynamic in that it works well with other fields of Design, like Jewellery Design. 

Conclusion

If you want to be a designer who wants to have their work seen by eyes across the world, understanding the principles of Industrial Design can help you achieve that quantity.

To develop your own interdisciplinary skills why not check out the 12 Principles of Interdisciplinary Design skills.