We need a new understanding of 'industrial design'

BIDA chairman Gus Desbarats says industrial design can bring key benefits to organisations and businesses.

The new UK National Occupational Standard for Industrial Design has just been formally ratified. It has been developed in workshops and consultations across the UK managed by BIDA (The trade body representing industrial design in the UK) with Creative & Cultural Skills.
The aim is to align the formal definition of industrial design with modern best-practice and clarify the contribution of industrial designers to innovation. As part of this clarity drive, at our last AGM we voted to change our name from British Design Innovation (BDI) to British Industrial Design Association (BIDA).  
The term industrial design is well recognised globally and applied to the work of innovation leaders like Jonathan Ive at Apple or the consultancy IDEO, but in the UK, industrial design gets lost inside a design ‘big tent’ covering everything from gas turbines to high heels.

Apple’s Jonathan Ive - industrial designer?

The common purpose of industrial designers is to help organisations plan complex innovation in their core products and services in ways that fully account for the rich complexity of human behaviour. This hasn’t changed since the birth of industrial design in the 1920s. Our creativity is still inspired as much by the brand, culture and purpose of organisations as by deep, well-informed empathy with their audience. Our professionalism is still determined by how well we engage with detailed technical and operational specialists and master constantly evolving technologies and processes. 
What has changed is that in a modern world where business excellence is all about creating rich and well-coordinated experiences, industrial design’s experience-mapping techniques have strategic value in their own right.  If the modern innovation question is ‘what can our organisation do to serve its purpose better’, modern technology has made it impossible to pin down, at the outset, what ‘touchpoints’ might be involved: human resources, physical devices, new materials, software or communications. This challenge is tailor-made for industrial designers.
In my 30 years of professional practice in the UK I’ve seen hundreds of naming fads come and go: User Led, Sustainable, Design Thinking, Experience Design. These are all part of a legitimate conversation about approaches to the profession, but they aren’t new professions.
We aren’t all engineering designers as well, our priorities and methods are totally different. We do need to collaborate deeply with engineers, so technical knowledge is an essential part of industrial design professionalism, but isn’t to be confused with the respected professional practice of engineering.

New Samuel Adams beer can, developed by Ideo

We also often share common brand experience goals with colleagues in graphic communications or interior design, but we face different collective professional issues, from our stronger desire for professional accreditation, to our urgent need to fix the severely damaged relationship between industrial design professionals in practice in the university sector.
There are of course different sub-categories within industrial design, and the exact ‘sub codes’ are undergoing their own review, but in BIDA, we believe that in modern industrial design there are really 3 clear subsets that matter: Services (people and complex systems), Interaction (software) and Products (physical objects).  Many professionals (like me and the The Alloy team) move freely between them and all share a common purpose of controlling experience-led innovation at the operational heart of an organisation, be it an airline check-in experience, the look and feel of a complex software application or the look of a car or phone.
At this time, when technical and organisational innovation is so important to the UK’s future industrial designers need to stand up and be heard so everyone can get on with smarter thinking about how to accelerate real growth.
Gus Desbarats is chairman of BIDA and The Alloy.

(Wed, 4 Dec 2013 | By Gus Desbarats)

Lee Broom designs mobile cocktail bar for Selfridges

(Wed, 4 Dec 2013 | By Tom Banks)

East London Design show

If you’re a London based design fan who hasn’t succumbed to such zeitgeistish phenomena as ‘cyber Monday’ or ‘Black Friday’, you’d do worse than popping down to the East London Design show for a spot of Christmas shopping this week.

Robot Nut Cracker

The show is celebrating its 20^th birthday this year, and promises its 2013 edition to be ‘the largest, most diverse’ event to date, according to organisers.
More than 140 designers, illustrators and makers will be showing work at the event in disciplines including print, product, interior, homeware, ceramics and jewellery design.

East End Prints fox

New spaces for this year include Spark, an area dedicated to new designers, and a Food Hall specializing in ‘artisan’ edibles.

Brooklyn slate cheeseboard

A boon to those looking to get creative themselves, the crafthouse space has also been expanded, and will be hosting workshops, demonstrations and children’s activities.

Nick Fraser lighting

These include the Design Your Own Christmas workshop, where visitors will be invited to have a go at screen-printing Christmas cards or ‘upcycling’ their unwanted bits and bobs into Christmas decorations and gifts.
We love this cute piece from Bottle Green Homes, inspired by their ‘in-house dachshund’, Jackson:

Bottle Green Homes

Remaining on a canine tip, Creature Clothes will be showing its wares, a range of products for dogs and cats:

Creature Clothes

We’re also quite taken with this cute owl/bike t shirt by illustrator Harriet Russell:

Harriet Russell t shirt

And this modernism print by Alfred & Wilde, an east London-based brand that creates pieces inspired by London architecture:

Alfred and Wilde print

East End Prints is showcasing a new range of limited-edition prints and originals; while the London Transport Museum will have a stall to show its design-led pieces.

London Transport Museum

East London Design show runs from 5 -8 December at the Truman Brewery, Hanbury Street Entrance, Off Brick Lane, London E1

Holoko designs

(Tue, 3 Dec 2013 | By Emily Gosling)

AKQA uses Oculus VR to develop Nissan car design system

AKQA has partnered with Nissan to develop an immersive virtual world, which allows the public to create their own car designs.

It was unveiled at the Tokyo Motor Show in Japan where an experience design powered by the Oculus VR platform - an immersive, wearable virtual technology - allowed visitors to design their visionary concept cars.
Users were given a headset, which allowed them to manipulate a base chassis of a concept car using the Nissan IDx system – the name given to the project.

A bespoke version of The Oculus VR hardware was designed and programmed by AKQA which created an experience for visitors who were taken through a series of questions to establish what their individual needs and desires as drivers were.

There were around 100 concept designs completed at the motor show, which were voted for by the public via social media – the most popular being an ‘extreme sports’ interpretation of the IDx Nismo, according to Nissan.

A re-imagining of the IDx Freeflow, a coupe interpretation, came a very close second.
The outcomes of the designs are helping Nissan understand more about their customers as the Nissan IDx project starts to add more voices to ‘the community’ according to Nissan, which evolve the Nissan IDx project in years to come.

 

(Tue, 3 Dec 2013 | By Tom Banks)

Government to use design principles in policy-making

The UK Government is piloting a Policy Lab to apply design principles to policy-making and public service.

Source: Michael D Beckwith

The Cabinet Office is currently looking to recruit someone to set up and lead the Policy Lab. The role would be a civil service position, and the chosen candidate will be given a year to set up and prove the value of the lab.
The Policy Lab will work on live issues and experiment with design-led approaches such as user-centred design, rapid prototyping of policy, and using digital tools to analyse data.
The aim is to ‘establish an entirely new organisation able to bring new and challenging ways of working into the heart of policy-making in Government’.
Cabinet Office says it has looked to international examples of using design thinking in policy-making, such as MindLab in Denmark and Nesta’s Public Services Lab. It says it is seeking to open up and improve the process of policy-making as part of the Civil Service Reform Agenda.
Last year, Corporate Edge’s Ronan Harrison wrote for Design Week about the benefits of design-led policy-making.

He said, ‘It’s not that current policy formation isn’t rigorous, it’s that its linear, analytical approach often misses vital signs of weaknesses and unanticipated potential.
‘What we need are tools and frameworks that rapidly stimulate as much of the awareness that the live environment eventually affords. We need multiple ways of seeing.’
If the Policy Lab proves successful, its processes and thinking could be rolled out more widely across the Civil Service, according to Government.
Cabinet Office also plays host to the Government Digital Service, which has rolled out the award-winning Gov.uk programme.

(Fri, 29 Nov 2013 | Angus Montgomery)

Method Design Lab creates Stix Toy Gun

Method Design Lab has worked with gift brand Firebox to create the Stix Toy Gun, a self-assembly elastic band toy gun kit.

Ready, aim, fire!

The product comprises a birch wood body panel and a number of rubber bands, which can be used as ammunition and to affix twigs, which users must find themselves, to the main part of the gun.
Method Design Lab was founded in 2011 as a collaboration between Central Saint Martins art college and consultancy Method.

The Stix gun kit

Stix was created by CSM product design graduate Colin O’Dowd, who also designed the packaging. It aims to encourage children to build their own toys using materials foraged from nature.
The Stix Toy Gun is the first in a range of ‘build to play’ products that will launch during 2014.
Yann Mathias, co-founder of Method Design Lab says, ‘The Stix range is a back-to-basics concept that reminds us of an era when things were simpler.’

Stix gun ready for action

Santiago Matheus, managing director of Method and co-founder of Method Design Lab, adds that the lab has a ‘number of products in development and set to launch over the next 12 months’.

(Mon, 2 Dec 2013 | Emily Gosling)

Royal Designers could become ‘unifying body for entire industry’

'The Royal Designers for Industry could become a unifying and representative body for the entire design industry, according to new Master of the Faculty Malcolm Garrett.


Garrett’s vision for the future of the RDIs is as an organisation that bring together all design industry bodies – such as D&AD, the Design Council and the Design Business Association – and act to represent them.
He says, ‘We’re a body that doesn’t have a competitive agenda. We could bring people together and act as a clearing house for issues. So if it’s an issue for the Design Council we can point people in that direction, or if it’s for D&AD we can point them in another.’

He says the RDIs are perfectly placed to do this as the organisation is non-competitive and represents up to 200 of the best designers in the world.
He adds, ‘We have other advantages – like our home in the Royal Society for Arts. Politicians will visit us here, but they might not make it out to Shoreditch.’
Garrett says he has had early informal discussions with a number of design industry bodies – all of whom have been receptive to the plan. He says, ‘Obviously they value their independence, but they also want their voices to be heard more strongly.’

He says that moves to set up an advisory board for the Associate Parliamentary Design and Innovation Group – set up by outgoing APDIG manager Jocelyn Bailey – could provide a structure for the project or support it.
Garrett takes up his role as Master of the Faculty of the Royal Designers for Industry this week.

This comes as seven new RDIs are being inducted: Paul Brown, Ian Cartlidge, Hussein Chalayan, Tony Meeuwissen, Sandy Powell, Patrick Woodroffe and Saeed Zahedi, alongside two honorary RDIs: Lidewij Edelkoort and Hartmut Esslinger.'

(Fri, 29 Nov 2013 |  Angus Montgomery)