Product Design Now + Hertzian Tales

"They say industrial design is one of the most disappointing professions in the world. After all, 21st century designers have the best computer programs and applications at their fingertips, using technology that would have been limited to science fiction novels just five years ago, and working with new materials possessing incredible properties, with the mass media eagerly anticipating new products, and with budgets that are usually extremely generous.(what?) Yet they remain far, very far from realizing their dreams"
-From Product Design Now, Intro. Link


Product Design now is a mainstream consumer driven design catalog sort of thing containing conceptual products designs and some realized ones as well, they are mostly driven by the next the newest technology or anticipations of ones to come. Regarding the electronic product, these days there seems to be no time to sit back and reflect on the current state of it all, because it's constantly changing. Compared to other kinds of industrial design which are more interested in changing styles, electronic product design seems to be wrapped up in technology, almost as if it's becoming the new car design, or already is.

Electronic product design is very much commercially based, that's why the book Hertzian Tales by Anthony Dunne interested me.
"As New technical developments alter the object and make it 'intelligent', they also set the object on a plane with no prior cultural references... although the physical aspects of these objects are still within the worlds of materials, their operation and their very state of being is well beyond the manipulation of matter and has more to do with information exchange than with form.
E. MANZINI The Material Of Invention.

Most designers of electronic objects have responded to this challange by accepting a role as a semiotician, a companion of packaging designers and marketeers, creating semiotic skins for incomprehensible technologies"
Page 16, Hertzian Tales.

Hertzian Tales seems to highlight the problems with the commercialization of electronic products: We want to use these new technologies to sell our products, we don't mind that they are unprecedented with no 'cultural references.' We begin to turn these technologies into imagery rather than objects, but represent them as objects. We use the power of novelty to sell them as well.

I need to research 'Product Semantics' also.

Thesis Proposal.

For my thesis I wanted to focus on a specific relationship between Industrial and digital media. After reading my assigned reading ‘The Ecstacy Of Communication’ I began thinking that the relationship between Industrial and Digital Media Design could be well examined through the idea of the product. More specifically how the digital technology has changed how we give for and meaning to objects as designers.

The miniaturization of the components that product designers traditionally house to make products surely must have an effect on the identity of these products. In the future we may not even need to follow any particular component parameters at all due to miniaturization of internal parts due to microchips etc. Does this loss of required mechanical and electrical parameters have a positive or negative effect on the identity of products? On one hand it gives the freedom to produce whatever identity we wish a certain product to have, giving the opportunity for designers to freely re-invent them, effectively throwing their pre-digital counterpart out the window such as the typewriter to the personal computer. On the other hand this might seem like a lost, unprecedented way to approach the design of products which could result in products with no preconceived cultural significance to guide us in their use. Because of this, it seems arguable that the aesthetic of digital products will always need to be translated through that of pre existing products which share a similar function and purpose, such as the typewriter to the personal computer. Because of this it is also arguable that the idea form follows function can never apply to digital products but is replaced with something like: precedent’s form follows function. Because of this it now seems arguable that the modernist love for the machine becomes somewhat irrelevant in the digital age, due to the machine no longer being an honest, pure and neutral aesthetic but rather having no aesthetic to source from. The digital machine is not necessarily seen as true and pure as the machine when we are able to “condense, contain and organise our lives” with it among other things forcing humanity upon it, are they tainted compared to the modernist machine?

Arguably, there are many arguments to be had.

Bibiliography:
Product Design Now
Jean Baudrilliard - "The Ecstacy Of Communication."