Industrial design

“ Industrial design includes designs and decorations of machines and equipment, transport means, textiles, living utensils and goods for cultural use, garments, furniture, furnishings and packing containers. ”

“ Most critics of industrial design complain of an overwhelming desire upon the part of the designer to over-decorate the structure. Surface enrichment runs wild over steam radiators, stoves, and wooden rocking chairs. Reserve is the watchword recommended as of extreme importance. The illustrations in this chapter are restricted to a limited range of design motives for the express purpose of simplifying the number of recommended methods. ”

“ The ordinary work of machine design, in which well-known parts are grouped to accomplish a given end, without much thought of attaining anything approaching the best,—such designing is like painting a fence, so many square feet of paper should be covered per day. But the real higher type of work cannot be measured in this way. ”

“ While the landscape designer has a broad latitude in his treatment of land divisions, the industrial designer or architect is restricted, on the other hand, by the structural requirements of the object and by his materials. He must cross his spaces or areas by horizontal shelves, or rails, or bands of metal that hold the structure together. As architecture is of fundamental importance in industrial design, let us see what the architect has in mind in designing a structure. ”

“ Requirements of an Industrial Problem
In order to start successfully upon a design, it is necessary to know what qualities a good industrial article should possess. Whether one is designing a bird-house, a chocolate set, or a gold pendant, the article must meet three needs: (1) It must be of service to the community or to the individual ”

“ The institutions, enterprises, organizations and citizens permitted to use an industrial design shall be responsible for the quality of the product based on the industrial design. The institutions, enterprises, organizations and citizens that have permitted the use of their industrial design may control the quality of the product based on the industrial design. ”

“ Then, again, there are many branches of manufacturing industry which greatly depend for their success upon the designer’s art, and it is necessary that the industrial designer should possess a knowledge of the processes of the manufacture in which his designs will be utilized, as well as of the properties and capabilities of the material to which they will be applied. ”

“ Enrichment of Terminals
Free and Dependent Contour Enrichment
As the public demands a happy ending to a story or a play, so does the eye demand a well-designed ending to a design. The part that terminal enrichment plays in industrial design is, therefore, to say the least, important to us as designers. Figure 157 illustrates terminals in thin metal and is shown by courtesy of the School Arts [91] Magazine from one of the articles by Mr. Augustus Rose. The outlines are in part dependent in character, controlled by rivets. ”

“ He is on an equally insecure footing regarding industrial design. His reason for liking or disliking a certain thing may depend upon some whim or fancy, the popular fashion of the times, or a desire to possess a duplicate of something he has seen. As a consumer with purchasing power, he should have the ability to analyze intelligently the contents of catalogs and store windows with the thought of securing the best in industrial art—something that may be accepted as standard one hundred years from now. ”

“ As a textbook, Industrial Arts Design is a practical guide for designing in wood, clay, and base and precious metals. It is intended for individual student use in the High Schools, Normal Schools, and Colleges and as a reference book for elementary school teachers. Its more complex problems are intended as definite helps to the industrial arts designer or craftsman. ”

“ The ideal method of developing the principles set forth in this chapter includes correlated activity in the shop by working out the project in the required material. As the technic of the individual improves, the larger range of design principles will be found to accompany and parallel his increasing skill. ”

“ Here the industrial department contains about 7600 volumes, chiefly devoted to the principal industries of the city,—textiles, electrical arts, machinery, and the arts of design, especially in jewelry. A room is at the service of draughtsmen: a dark closet is available for copyists who bring cameras. When a new book comes in the reader or the artist likely to want it is notified. ”

“ When we consider the inertia of mind and body, it is truly marvelous that there has been any progress in machine design. In fact, if the machine-building trade were in retrogression, with only a few new men being taken in there would be little or no excuse for making machine tools of new design. The older workers would get along about as well without the improved machines. ”

“ And in the same way the whole scheme must be made to conform to the economic conditions.
If the machine under consideration is like a machine tool, and is to be offered for sale, then the manufacturing, selling, and use must be taken into account. In machine-tool design a wholly new invention is an exceedingly rare thing, and a successful new machine is still more rare. ”

“ It is again emphasized that whether the design possesses a free or a dependent outline, or a combination of both types, all parts of the design must be held together by entire unity. The rivets are occasionally placed toward the edge and a domed boss is used to accent the center as is shown in Figure 158.
The Ionic Volute
Terminal Enrichment in Wrought Metal
As the Curve of Force was a valuable curve in wood construction, so we find it an equally valuable curve for wrought metal. Its recurrence again and again in industrial design leads us to appreciate its value in the arts. ”

“ It must possess beauty of proportion, outline, and color.
Ruskin said that a line of beauty must also be a line of service. The "stream line body" in automobile construction is the result of the automobile maker's attempt to combine beauty with service. This is the attitude that should govern the union of beauty and service in all of the industrial arts.
Divisions in Design Evolution and Enrichment
There are three divisions or phases in the designing of a structure and its enrichment. These are: (1) Structural Design; (2) Contour Enrichment; (3) Surface Enrichment. ”

“ It is true that the old time craftsman with consummate skill fully enriched large surfaces, but two factors interfere with this mode of treatment today. The first factor is the decidedly practical nature of the problem. The service to which the modern industrial project is put interferes with the use of full surface enrichment. The second is the lack of skill on the part of the modern amateur designer. It is a sound policy to avoid the ornateness that frequently accompanies a large and unskillfully planned area. ”

“ The preliminary steps toward surface enrichment should be thought out before they are drawn.
A designer will be materially helped if he devotes a few moments of thought to his design problem before he applies the pencil to the paper. In the end the time given to thinking out his problem will gain for him both increased excellence of design and rapidity of execution, provided his thinking is systematic. ”

“ The object of systematic thought is to form a mental picture of the enrichment to be in full accord with the materials and construction and to be sympathetically related to the structural axes and to the contours. The unenriched mass has been designed and we are now ready for the consideration of surface enrichment in the following order. ”

“ It is, therefore, the intention to present design of industrial character in its simplest form, freed from technicalities or ambiguous statements. It is intended to give the average individual not particularly interested in drawing or design a knowledge of the subject, based upon principles that have survived for hundreds of years in architectural monuments and history. ”

“ In an age which has seen the development of an organized industrial system of extraordinary and minute division of labour under the factory system, and has now entered an epoch of further specialization of labour with the invention and use of complicated machinery driven by steam and electric power, in association with which labour becomes not only specialized but almost automatic, we perhaps hardly need reminding of the collective influence, since for the effective supply of the big world-market all products are the result of collective human labour. ”

“ A design to be submitted to the craftsman should be a graphic record of technical facts in addition to good design, which requires that we should have an expressive technical means of rendering each process. The last column, on Plate 52, indicates this rendering. In addition to this rendering each one of the eight technical processes has been carried through three design steps. 1. (first column, Plate 52) Planning the original primary mass, with its inceptive axis suggested by the structure and intended use. It passes through the point of concentration. ”

“ The trend of the present demand, a persistent growth of several years, is towards a personal and individual expression in the crafts or industrial arts. This tendency is the natural swing of the pendulum from the machine-made product of the manufactory which in its turn was the inevitable result of mechanical invention. ”

“ "The successful construction of all machinery depends on the perfection of the tools employed; and whoever is a master in the arts of tool-making possesses the key to the construction of all machines..... The contrivance and construction of tools must therefore ever stand at the head of the industrial arts."—C. BABBAGE, Exposition of 1851. ”

“ In a remarkable sketch of the history of civilization, Professor Huxley remarked, in 1887, that the wonderful increase of industrial production by the application of machinery, the improvement of old technical processes and the invention of new ones, constitutes the most salient feature of the world's progress during the last fifty years. ”

“ When we compare an ideal product of handicraft, like a Florentine table of the sixteenth century, with an ideal product of mechanical art—say a modern bathroom—the contrasting virtues and defects become plain. The conditions that make possible good machine-work are, first of all, a complete calculation of consequences, embodied in a working drawing or [219] design: to deviate by a hair’s breadth from this calculation is to risk failure. The qualities exemplified in good machine-work follow naturally from the implements: they are precision, economy, finish, geometric perfection. ”

“ The leading industrial firms, such as Albert Kahn, Inc., and that of Frankland Dark were asked to build in many parts of the world, for the traditions of the old-established technologies are of especial value in such work. ”

“ This effectual engrossing of the technological heritage by the owners will extend to any branch of the industrial arts in which so considerable a material equipment is required, in appliances and raw materials, that the workmen who go into this given line of employment cannot practically create or acquire it as they go along. ”

“ Another point of analogy between modern engineering and modern management lies in the fact that modern engineering proceeds with comparative certainty to the design and construction of a machine or structure of the maximum efficiency with the minimum weight and cost of materials, while the old style engineering at best only approximated these results and then only after a series of breakdowns, involving the practical reconstruction of the machine and the lapse of a long period of time. ”

“ It appears, then, that the accumulation of technological experience is not of itself sufficient to bring out a consecutive improvement of the industrial arts, particularly not such an advance in the industrial arts as is embodied in the machine technology of late-modern times. ”

“ Put alongside buildings in which the architect has glorified his own idiosyncrasy or pandered to the ritual of conspicuous waste, our industrial plants at least have honesty and sincerity and an inner harmony of form and function. There is nothing peculiar to machine-technology in these virtues, however, for the modern factory shares them with the old New England mill, the modern grain elevator with the Pennsylvania barn, the steamship with the clipper, and the airplane hangar with the castle. ”

“ But as seen from the point of view of technology, and more specifically from that of workmanship as it underlies the technological system, it is best characterised as the era of the machine industry, or of the machine process. ”

“ And both the trained efficiency of the labor and the availability of the material objects engaged are a function of the "state of the industrial arts."
Yet the state of the industrial arts is dependent on the traits of human nature, physical, intellectual, and spiritual, and on the character of the material environment. It is out of these elements that the human technology is made up; and this technology is efficient only as it meets with the suitable material conditions and is worked out, practically, in the material forces required. ”

“ Mechanical appliances for use in industry are designed and worked out as contrivances to facilitate or to abridge manual labour, and it is in terms of labour that the whole industrial system is conceived and its incidence, value and output rated. ”