Welcome to Industrial Design

Well I would like to start off this response by saying that I’m pretty annoyed by the first article. I read the second article before the first and as soon as I started reading the first one, I started to look up all the names that they started to mention. The first 5 that I looked up were white males. How can such a modern article simply forget all the important most notable black people who invented all those things mentioned in the second article? It’s honestly astounding how this is possible. I am honestly mad at myself for being so ignorant to this. When the second article asked me to name a black inventor, I couldn’t think of one. Why don’t we talk about any of this? Why do I not know that these amazing black people built and invented so many first things? It makes me really angry to think about. I couldn’t even really focus on the first article after I started to realize what was happening. Even at Stanford, we perpetuate this ignorance. To me, almost every single “leader” in the Product Design field that I know about are white males in their 60s. I don’t even know what I’m supposed to be comparing other than the simple fact that the first article mentions nothing about this discrepancy. It makes me mad and after all the discussions I’ve been having in section, it makes me even more mad. Sexism, racism, discrimination. It all is so evident in the design world and we should be doing more to change that. No one has mentioned these things in my previous Product Design classes and I’m glad that this class is calling theses issues to my attention. We should all come together and make a change.

When I look at the assumptions of the targeted audiences of both articles, I think that the second one is for people who are more curious and want a more in depth history of design — people who care about the discrepancy in who is known for inventions and who isn’t. The first article is assuming that a normal designer is simply reading up about different types and forms of design. I think the second one is more encouraging and inspiring than the first one. I got heated and motivated in the second one to make a difference in this world whereas the first one felt more like simple information giving and didn’t
“motivated” me as much.