1 Comment Written by Robert on June 5, 2008 – 7:07 am

Product design is a practice that involves the creation of objects that are simultaneously functional and aesthetic. These products are not limited to a specific status, but extend from the mundane, everyday artifact to the exotic luxury item.

Toward that end, product designers often need to manage a wide range of expertise including ergonomics, manufacturing techniques, engineering methods, marketing strategies, cultural awareness, environmental issues, and aesthetic judgment. Although distinctions between product design and industrial design vary greatly depending upon different contexts, the former is often considered to be a subfield of the latter.

This categorization may be confusing to many because in practice the terms are used interchangeably and indeed, they encompass the same spectrum of output possibilities, ranging from domestic artifacts like furniture and tableware to mechanized products like electronics and appliances.

However, the two practices do tend to come with different connotations. In particular, product designers are often seen to embody a more customized, craft-based (Craft) approach to the design process.

This is not to say that the products they design are not ultimately manufactured with industrial mass-production techniques; rather, it simply implies that product designs may be geared towards more specialized consumer markets, or be characterized by relatively lower-run productions. In other words, product design is often identified as a subfield of industrial design, not because of a reduced range of possible products, but by a specific perceived approach to the design process itself. This distinction may have resulted froma number of different factors.

Firstly, the term“industrial” can be said to be somewhat outmoded in its historic relationship to the Industrial Revolution. Product design as a professional discipline largely developed in response to this perceived shift in context. Furthermore, the term “industrial” implies an explicit emphasis on manufacturing aspects over other steps in the product development process.

Although product designers also frequently collaborate with manufacturers in developing their designs, this relationship is not necessarily a defining characteristic of the practice. The apparent dichotomy between craft-based approaches versus the more technical elements of design may account for why recent years have seen increasing numbers of practitioners, educators, and managers adopt the phrase “product design” over “industrial design.”

Whether this perceived distinction is accurate in actual professional practice is of course up for debate; most self-identified practitioners of industrial design pride themselves on their aesthetic abilities, and many product designers privilege engineering concerns over issues of style. Ultimately, both practices share almost all the same objectives, processes, and technologies, and the phrases are still often used interchangeably.