Greetings, everyone. So, we've talked about a variety of Design Disciplines in the introductory lecture to this module. Today, we'll talk about one specific one referred to as industrial design. Industrial design, which also referred to as product design, essentially refers to the creation of consumer goods. And this could be everything from the smallest spoon that you can think about to the largest machine. Let's take an example. Let's take an example of something like a toothbrush. Now a toothbrush, as you see in this specific example, here you see a very generic kind of a toothbrush. The packaging is very generic, it's just a plastic bag. The toothbrush, as I will take this out, the toothbrush itself is also very generic. It's essentially a transparent toothbrush with very little specifics on how one holds it, what it does. So, one might refer to this as an archetypal product, right? It's one example of what a toothbrush could look like. If you think about beauty, utility, and sustainability, those are three things that we worry about as designers. And look at the market, so you might be hard-pressed to find something like this in the marketplace. It will be difficult to find a toothbrush that looks exactly like this. However, you will find a range of toothbrushes with different shapes, different forms, different kinds of grips, different colors. You might find a variation on these bristles, some with larger bristles, some with smaller bristles, some with hard, medium, or soft bristles. So what happens with design is that designers look at people's needs Brushes designed for children, brushes designed for adults. So, what happens is that depending upon people's needs, depending upon what aesthetics we're looking for, what kind of ergonomics we need, designers come up with a range of variations on the idea. So while this is a very generic, simple toothbrush, what you actually find in the marketplace is something that's a lot more variation. You will find a range of different kinds of toothbrushes in the marketplace. So, in a sense, what design does is exactly that. It looks at people's needs and converts those needs into products that people can use on a daily basis. There's a definition for industrial design, and this one definition from the IDSA or the Industrial Designers Society of America. And they define design, as you see on the screen, as the professional service of creating products and systems that optimize function, value, and appearance for the mutual benefit of both user and manufacturer. So let's unpack this a little bit. Let's look at some of the specifics of this definition. So it's a professional service, which means that you can get a degree in industrial design. You can work as an industrial designer. You can get a job as an industrial designer. What does it create? It creates products and systems. Now, the word product, we all understand. It's tangible goods like the toothbrush that we just saw. But it also talks about systems. Very often, products do not exist in a vacuum. Products are essentially components of larger systems. So a toothbrush goes hand in hand with toothpaste, which sits on a sink. It might sit on a toothbrush holder. So there is a seas of other artifacts, other products that this product relates to. The larger systems also includes all the people involved in making it, all the people involved in recycling it. So every product exists in a larger system, and very often, designers are involved, not in the creation of just that one product, but the entire system as well. So what does this product and system do? It optimizes function, value, and appearance. And we've talked about the notion of beauty, utility, and sustainability before, as the P goals of design. Here, the term value is important. What does value mean? Essentially, it brings something of value to the people who are involved. So if you are a child, you want a toothbrush that brings you value as a child, something that you can hold, something that's fun, something that has maybe a shape of an animal on it. All those things bring value to that specific user group. And it's for the benefit of who? The user and the manufacturer. So who are we designing for, and how will that design come to market? I would like to add something to this definition. What's missing here is the notion of sustainability. As we create products for the mutual benefit of the users and the manufacturers, we also need to think about the impact on the environment. Why don't we say that we design products that are of value to both the user, the manufacturer, and to the planet as well. So let's extend this definition of industrial design to say that industrial design is a service of creating new products and systems that benefit people, that benefit manufacturers, that benefit corporations, but also benefit the planet on which we live. So, that could be one definition of industrial design. So let's look at an example, let's look at what industrial design is through an example. So you've seen several chairs, right. This is a very simple wooden chair on which you can sit, could be a dining chair, could be a side chair. But you've also seen chairs like these. This is a folding chair that you can take outside, that you can sit outside in your lawn or in your yard. This is another kind of chair that we use in a cafe, could be used where you have a dining table and lots of people that might be sitting together. You could take this chair to the beach. This is a reclining chair that also folds up. So you can see that while the action of sitting is standard across people, the contexts in which this sitting takes place, whether it's at the beach or whether it's an office, or whether it's at home, all those contexts then determine the nature of the design. It determines what the shape of the chair is like. It determines what materials it is made out of. It determines all these other aspects of what that artifact looks like, how it is manufactured, how it is used, etc. So these are the kinds of things that we have to keep in mind as industrial designers, as product designers. Let's take a specific example of a chair which is designed by a company called Herman Miller, and this chair is called the Embody chair. What you're seeing in this image is a back view, side view, and front view of this chair. So, this is a task chair. So essentially, it's been designed for people who might be working in an office, working on sitting at a computer all the time, who might spend eight, nine, or even longer hours in the workplace. Of course, it can be used at home as well, but the primary application of this chair is to be used in an office sort of an environment. So let's look at this idea of this chair from the three perspectives that we talked about, the notion of beauty, the notion of utility and the notion of sustainability. So we've talked about this before. If these are the three things that designers think about, how can we apply those to the concept of this chair? This chair, this Embody chair, how did it come into being? Now, if you look at the kinds of products that Herman Miller has created as its repertoire, it has a whole series of products, as you can see the line up of the Herman Miller chairs in front of you. The blue one that you see at the end, this chair, this is the Embody chair. Now, one of the things that the designer was thinking about is the notion of allowing the aesthetics, allowing the shape, allowing the beauty of the chair to emerge through the design process, right? So, as they focused on things like ergonomics, as they focused on things of human comfort, as they thought about how do people who sit on a computer all day, how do they behave? How do they move? As they thought of those things, the shape, the form of the chair emerged. So, it is an emergent process, and this chair took on its form based upon all the process of design that the designers were going through. Let's look at the notation of utility as well. So, one of the things that the designers set out to do from the very beginning was this notion of comfort. How can we make this chair comfortable for long periods of time when someone is sitting in that chair? What you traditionally see on chairs is cushions. You see very often in a task chair, in a chair that one might use in an office, you might see thick pads of foam, right? So this foam, essentially, is the one that is allowed to compress. It gives you comfort as you sit in the chair. There's a certain compression. There's a certain give, and it provides you some comfort. This chair, this Embody chair, takes a different approach. There is no foam in this seat. There is no foam in the back of the chair. So what you see here is what Herman Miller has created, what they refer to as pixelated support. So you see, each of these sections, each of these hexagonal regions, are independently movable of each other. So what this chair does is that it is able to shift and move depending upon the individual that sits in it. So what the company did, what Herman Miller did over long periods of time is it did lots of ergonomic studies. They created what are refered to as pressure maps. They saw how people sat. They saw where the pressure comes from. They mapped out these variations on how people sit. And that led to the design of this sort of a system in which the individual pixels, as it were, on this chair can move, thereby, providing maximum comfort. So, you're able to get a significant amount of comfort in the seat without having to have any form of a cushion, because one of the things that a cushion does is it cuts back breathability. So, what this chair is able to do is without a cushion, it gives the support, it gives the give, but also is able to allow some certain amount of breathability. If you look at the back of the chair, you can see that there's a form of a branching structure. So you can see this is a large area. It branches into this, then branches into this, and branches into something, gets smaller. And then it gets even smaller further down. So what this kind of structure does to the chair, again, it gives it flexibility. So as you lean back in this chair, it's able to move. It's able to flex. And it's able to respond to the movements of the human body. So if you think of the utility of this chair, if you think of how the company has thought about the notion of comfort, how they've thought of the notion of ergonomics. It has created an extremely comfortable chair that provides the possibility of sitting in it over extended periods of time without causing any health damage to the people who are sitting in the chair. So this is one key part of the utility of this device, of this product. And finally, let's think of sustainability. So, Herman Miller is a company that has been thinking about sustainability and environmental impact of their products for very long time. Let's look at some of the statistics of this chair. So, this chair, the Embody chair, as this diagram shows, is 95% recyclable. So at the end of its life, you can take it apart. It comes with a set of instructions on how to take the chair apart. And these individual parts of the chair, 95% of those parts can be recycled. You can see a breakdown of the materials. It has 38% steel which is totally recyclable. Most metals can be recycled over and over again. It has 38% of plastic, aluminium, textile, foam, and 1% of other materials that are not classified in this diagram. So, what you see here is a concern for the environment. What you see here is that at the end of the life of this chair, it just doesn't end up in a landfill, but actually can be taken apart. And only 5% of it doesn't come back into the system again. The rest of the chair can actually come back into the system, therefore, minimizing the total amount of waste that goes out into the world. And then, another interesting thing to think about with this chair is that the chair, in addition to being 95% recyclable., 42% of the chair, almost half of the chair, is made from recycled materials to begin with. So the recycled content breaks down into 28% post-consumer and 14% pre-consumer recycled content. So you can see that in thinking about this chair, the company Herman Miller has thought about what can we do from a design perspective. What can we do from the perspective of sustainability to make sure that this chair doesn't increase bad environmental impacts? But actually takes into account what can we do as designers to cut down some of the impacts on the environment? So what we've seen here in this presentation through the simple example of this chair is that industrial design thinks of consumer goods, like toothbrushes, like chairs, like cars, etc. But it again, thinks of three important things. It thinks of the beauty of things, thinks of the utility of things, and thinks of sustainability. So this one quick example of a chair should give you some idea of what designers think about and what they create at the end of the design process. Thank you.
