Industrial designers are not only riding the shifts in their industries. They are creating the shifts by designing straws that filter unsafe water for developing countries, draperies made of biodegradable materials, and devices that reduce the body’s temperature in order to improve neurological outcomes in unconscious cardiac arrest patients.
These shifts from design for Western countries to design for developing countries, from wasteful design to eco-friendly design, and from simple products to highly technical medical devices have become major trends in the field.
And, consequently, “Shift” was the theme of the Northeast Chapter of the Industrial Designers Society of America’s regional conference, held April 20 to 22 at Rhode Island School of Design. The conference attracted 21 speakers from around the country, including RISD alumnus Stephen Lane, CEO of the Providence-based Item Group.
Lane took the audience on a virtual trip through his career in product design. He started with the film strip picture frame – the first product he sold with royalties as an independent industrial designer circa 1984.
“This began a journey of asking and questioning what value is all about in the design profession,” he said.
Next he spoke about Item’s development of the “big kid cup” – an evolution of the sippy cup – for Playtex, using algorithms to design the spill-proof top.
That led the company to think of the cup as a fluid management system, which in turn opened the spectrum of possible products it could develop. The cup led to the design of a breast pump to the most successful product launch in the company’s history; a fluid management device that dispenses hyper-controlled volumes of fluids containing silicon for lubrication, oils and adhesives in manufacturing settings.
“When you walk into a factory today, you literally see dozens of hundreds of these on assembly tabletops,” he said.
The high-tech dispenser set the bar on the complexity of products Item aspires to design. “We’re always looking through this foggy section at the end of a newly accomplished goal, and we’re asking, ‘What next?’ ” he said.
Now the company is designing a product for Life Recovery Systems that can control the temperature of the human body to help cardiac arrest patients. Lane calls the product “the beginnings of [Item’s] ability to change the world.”
Cynthia Smith, curator for the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York City, also spoke of industrial design in terms of how it is changing the world. But her focus was more on how it is changing the developing world.
Smith discussed an upcoming exhibition titled “Design for the Other 90 Percent.” She asked audience members what they would do if they only had $2 a day to live on. She said almost half the world’s population, 2.8 billion people, exists on less than $2 per day.
“This global poverty has been a call to action for designers,” she said.
Some designers are taking a stand by designing affordable, socially responsible products such as $100 laptops for the education of children in developing countries, sugarcane charcoal as a cleaner alternative to firewood and longer-lasting insecticide-treated mosquito nets that fight malaria.
Meagan O’Neill, editor of the eco-Web site TreeHugger.com, said some industrial designers are also starting to take a stand for the environment by developing recyclable carpet, biodegradable textiles and biodegradable packaging.
And yet “we’re still functioning with some of our old design methods,” she said. “A finished product still represents only about 5 percent of the raw materials used to make and deliver it. … We need to learn how to do more with less … how to create products that don’t end up in the landfill.”
