The Intersection of Form and Function: A Look at Design and Aesthetics in Heavy Industry.
Why is there an aesthetic disparity between industrial and consumer products?
Introduction
Human emotions are evoked by a multitude of external factors, one of those being aesthetics — the beauty in things. The appreciation of elegance in products is so subjective that fields of art, philosophy, engineering, architecture etc. and sometimes psychology hold very different views on this subject. This leads to the question: how can something so plain and intuitive create so much confusion? In fact the prevalence of aesthetics in the minds of consumers has let to its expectation not only in products, but in retail outlets, graphics design, billboards, thus suggesting that we are in an era of beautification. Hence the word Design is usually synonymous with aesthetics, whereas aesthetics result from a good design, but design is not aesthetics.
Thus far no school of thought has come up with an all encompassing definition the true value of aesthetics in products, more especially in heavy industry such as logistics, aviation, mining and manufacturing. All these industries always favoured design choices such as functionality, safety, durability and other attributes over aesthetics for many years. This brings up the question; Is there a significant role that aesthetics play in the overall design of a product for the general user? The answer to this question is obvious in the consumer products space, but very murky on the heavy industry side. Why?
History
If we to go back in history to the time just before the industrial revolution. It quickly becomes very clear that the function of design and manufacturing was exactly the same. In fact the product was often designed and made by the same person(or family), using skills and trades that have been passed on from generation to generation. This resulted in designs and product expressions that are very localised and locked to the specific maker. After the industrial revolution, it became possible to separate designs from the manufacturing process. This resulted in the capability to produce items that are generic in form while still able to meet the needs of many consumers.
This is the same era where a lot of great Industrial designers came into the scene. Designers such as Raymond Loewy who is said to have designed for business, Henry Dreyfuss for people and Dieter rams for behaviour. All these men have made significant contributions to the field of industrial design and their philosophies influenced many of the designs that we see in modern products.
Raymond Loewy
Raymond Loewy kicked off his industrial design career in 1929. He is one of the few mavericks that can be called the ‘father of modern industrial design’. He lived by a principle famously known as MAYA(Most Advanced Yet Acceptable). His portfolio was the most diverse in design history, having worked on heavy industries and consumer products. This makes him and ideal person to understand the role aesthetics play across industries. In 1975 the Smithsonian institute showcased his designs on a four month exhibit that was coined, “the man who changed the face of industrial design.”
His most notable work include the following:
GG1 and S1 locomotives
Interior design of Saturn I, Saturn V, and Skylab
Studebaker Avanti, Starliner Coupé,
Logos for Greyhounds bus company, Shell, Exxon
Lucky Strike cigarette packaging
What stands out the most from him is the following statement; “The adult public’s taste is not necessarily ready to accept the logical solutions to their requirements if the solution implies too vast a departure from what they have been conditioned into accepting as the norm.” That is how a combination of the above statement and the MAYA principle, gives us a clue on how he managed to conjure up such revolutionary work during his time.
Henry Dreyfuss
Henry Dreyfuss was the man behind the form factor of the table top telephone as we know it today, he started developing it in the 1930’s. His design was so successful, that it ended up being the most commonly used phone design between 1955 and 1995. The early versions of that design were from a competition he won at Bell labs called “phone of the future”. In 1941 he collaborated with Raymond Loewy to design strategy rooms for joint chief of staff. Dreyfuss had different philosophies to his predecessor Raymond, but both men always had the needs of the users as a centerpiece in their thinking and philosophies. Dreyfuss stressed that good design was for everyone. He felt that “products of the applied arts are part of everyday living and working”.
Dieter Rams
When we speak of design and refer specifically to artifacts such as buildings, furniture or just general non-electronic tools that we use on a daily basis. One major characteristic of these items is that their purpose lies in their function and less in their design. The general public will always perceive a chair as a sitting instrument, it is less likely to be mistaken for anything else, same applies to buildings and other general furniture and tools.
Dieter Rams arrived in the scene when electronics were becoming ubiquitous in the consumer space. And one thing about electronic products such as a radio or television sets is that, functionality is more abstract than in other design artifacts. A button on a radio can be used for multiple functions such as on/off, volume, tuning, etc. Dieter Rams was the evangelist of simplicity, he spent 40 years at Braun designing some of the most legendary products there. In that time he extrapolated the design philosophy of “less is more” into ten Design principles that are still used religiously by some of the largest consumer electronics companies in the world. One of the most apparent ones being Apple, as their Chief Design Officer Jonathan Ive mentioned several times that he draws most of his design inspiration from Dieter Rams.
The Contemporary Era
The late 70’s well into the early 80’s was the beginning of an era of Personal computing, and because of software housed in them, the gap between functionality and form increased by orders of magnitude. This also increased complexity of the design process for modern electronic systems. The amount of information that needs to be taken into consideration during the design process is now astronomical. However, one thing very clear in the current era of design, especially for consumer electronics is that aesthetics and simplicity are more favourable over other characteristics such as configurability.
As much as Raymond Loewy demonstrated in the past that artistic expression and design in heavy industries was taken seriously in the early 20th century. That was an era when most organisations realised that design was not exclusive to engineering. Other areas of design had to be incorporated to enhance the user experience. If one was to look at Raymond Loewy’s locomotive designs vs modern locomotives with the exception of passenger trains. It becomes very clear that if aesthetics are not intertwined to a function(i.e aerodynamics), they usually get dismissed.
What lead to the elimination of aesthetics in heavy industry whilst the rest of the consumer industry expects aesthetics as standard? Why do we appreciate the so-called “futuristic” designs in film, whereas in reality we are happy with objects and machines that look like relics? This same problem has trickled down to design philosophies of industrial software products. The software for heavy industry looks like it was made for machines and not for man, it is boring, it looks dull and is not fun to use especially without rigorous training.
Design Decision Making Process
Now one thing that most people in the product design space agree on is just how intricate it is to take a product from inception to the hands of users. The source of complexity in product development/design is the shear amount of metrics monitored throughout the life-time of the product in order to measure its viability. One metric that carries more weight than any other is commercial viability obviously. The product needs to demonstrate that, it will at some point return the capital that was invested by the organisation to bring it to market. That is the crux of what drives the decision making process for products that you see in the market today.
This makes one wonder whether aesthetics add any significant value to the end product in heavy industries. Were the fathers of industrial design wishful thinkers by adding aesthetics to huge machines such as the Saturn rockets? Usually during the design process, the easy decision is to eliminate aesthetics all together in order to cut costs. The fundamental flaw in that decision making process is the assumption that a product can be treated as an equation, where sum of components Xn and/or features and characteristics Yn translate to overall value Zn. Value being cost, ease of manufacturing, environmental footprint etc. Therefore the supposed equation is often used to eliminate components, features or characteristics that are deemed low priority or “nice to have”. Those who pursue this rationale often say this is the only way one can improve the commercial viability of the product without compromising the overall perceived value of the product.
Linear and Non-linear Outcomes
The main reason some of these decision makers think this way, is because they are not familiar with the linear and nonlinear outcomes in product design decisions. If one is operating from a purely linear perspective, product optimisation by elimination and addition of components makes perfect sense. But very often the response from customers or the market tends to be nonlinear. There are cases where customers love or hate your product because of the font that was used on the product name. It is not a straightforward exercise to predict some of these non-linear responses, because there is virtually an infinite number of ways a product can be configured.
Via Negativa
A deterministic approach where one needs to predict the future in order to come up with the best design, rarely works. The best position to commence from, is with the assumption that the future is unknown and uncertain. Your customers or users may love an “aesthetic feature” today, and yet totally reject it tomorrow. Those are the realities that designers are faced with.
The process that brings one closer to an exceptional design is not the process of adding, but a process of removal. This does not imply the removal of features or functionality. This means the removal of everything about the product that doesn’t qualify it as a good design. The great minds of Dieter, Raymond, Henry and many others provided us with principles instead of manuals. The most rational thing to do is to rid your design of anything that doesn’t live up to those principles, and with the aid of “via negativa” philosophy you will most certainly know what a good design is not instead of attempting to predict whether your customers will like it. This thought process will embed the customer at the heart of all designs, whilst not predicting how they would perceive the product in the future.
Conclusion
At Castry we obsess about user centered design. We believe that complexity needs to be abstracted away from the user. We strive to embed process onto our products thus eliminating the need for extensive training for our users. Products that are designed well will always look fantastic and at the same time provide the customer with tremendous value. All the literature that we publish is based on the risks that we have taken and the principles that we have followed. Finally and most importantly, we believe in products that are aesthetically pleasing. Not for style or for the sake of beauty, but for our designs to be unobtrusive, where a diverse number of users can appreciate aesthetics of the products without that being the centre of attention. We believe that all products should evoke the emotion of pleasure when the customer looks at them, including all products in the heavy industry.
In summary: A good design is unobtrusive, most advanced yet acceptable.
References:
Designing for People — Henry Dreyfuss, Skyhorse Publishing,1955
http://www.idsa.org/content/henry-dreyfuss-fidsa
Beautiful Beings: Aesthetics in Industrial Design and Cultural Studies Prasad Boradkar, Assistant Professor Arizona State University
Design. History, Theory and Practice of Product Design Published on Aug 28, 2015 , Benhard.E Burdek
