What Is Industrial Design?

Industrial design is a creative field that involves the development of concepts for the production of a wide variety of items, ranging from common objects like toys to more complex industrial equipment. The field of industrial design is one that serves as a sort of confluence point for engineering, art and imagination. Steps involved in industrial design may be initiated by a client, or it may be the sole effort of the designer behind the concept.

Sometimes companies may have products that they wish to improve based on a stated set of standards that may have been compiled through methods like customer surveys and feedbacks. In this instance, the company might be looking for a way to improve an already existing product. Such a company might engage the services of a company that specializes in industrial design, and they will work out the modalities for the production of the improved version of the product. For instance, the company might be a producer of heaters with low sales as a result of complaints from consumers regarding a defect in the design of the heaters. The industrial designer will come up with a different design for the heater that will make it more effective and also generate more sales for the company.

In other cases, the process of industrial design may be something that the designers involved in the project do as a consequence of their research regarding gaps in the market. Assuming they conduct market research and discover that there is a gap in the market for a specific type of product, they will develop the product and then work with manufacturers to mass-produce the product. For instance, the industrial designers could discover that there is a gap in the market for battery-operated massagers that target various muscle groups in the body. As part of the process of industrial design, they could fully develop the products and introduce them to the market.

Organizations are not the only beneficiaries of industrial design, because individuals also benefit from the process as well. For instance, an individual with an idea regarding a product can engage the services of industrial designers to take the idea from its initial stages to reality.An example of this would be an individual who had an idea about a piece of production equipment that can be used in a more effective production of rice. The individual could work with designers as a part of industrial process to fully develop the product.