Simon King and Kuen Chang - Understanding Industrial Design: Principles for UX and Interaction Design

Understanding Industrial Design: Principles for UX and Interaction Design

Simon King

Kuen Chang

Beijing Boston Farnham Sebastopol Tokyo

Praise for Understanding Industrial Design

The most difficult and interesting problems of the 21st century wont be solved by apps alone. Software might be eating the world, but its the hardware mouth doing the chewing. As the boundary between digital and physical grows ever blurrier, more UX designers will have to consider more than just a 2D screen to do their jobs. This book connects the dots between interaction and industrial design in clear, thoughtful prose with vivid examples. Even if you dont design hardware (yet), its timeless insights and principles culled from decades of physical products cant help but make your designs better. Get this book.

DAN SAFFER, AUTHOR OF MICROINTERACTIONS

Industrial design is one of the great design disciplines, and its influence on user experience design is both underestimated and misunderstood. As computing becomes more distributed and the Internet of Things becomes the dominant context for UX design, its increasingly important for all UX designers to become literate in the principles of industrial design, to incorporate it into their practice, and to understand its core ideas to work on teams with industrial designers. This book is a great and readable introduction to the intersection of ID and UX, written by designers with years of experience in both.

MIKE KUNIAVSKY, AUTHOR OF SMART THINGS

This wonderful book, full of elaborate and detailed design examples, represents an important step in the evolution of the field of interaction design. The principles within are inordinately useful. Its a must-have for the bookshelf for communication, industrial, interaction, and system designers who are practicing design today.

JODI FORLIZZI, PROFESSOR OF HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY

Great product design needs to consider so much more than functionality and usability; it is also about emotions, materials, pleasure, manufacturability, and sustainability, to name just a few other topics. This book is a journey through different perspectives on design that are often overlooked, but that matter so much for great products.

Especially given the IoT, where the digital and physical experiences of products become much more intertwined, Understanding Industrial Design is a must-read for any designer, developer, or entrepreneur working on a product with physical touch points.

The book plays another important role: it fosters mutual understanding and deeper collaboration of the all too often separated digital and physical design practices.

MARTIN CHARLIER, CO-AUTHOR OF DESIGNING CONNECTED PRODUCTS

An essential read for any interaction designer or UX professional who wants to understand the history, role, and responsibilities of Industrial Design.

TOM METCALFE, DESIGNER AND TUTOR

Throughout the last century, the discipline of industrial design has refined an understanding of how to design physical products for people. More recently, as computation and network connectivity extend beyond the screen, interaction designers and UX professionals also find themselves addressing design problems in the physical world. Smart products, connected devices, the Internet of Thingsthese terms address a new class of product that is both physical and digital, one that speaks to the need for design disciplines to leave their silos and find productive overlap. For designers who built their careers on the nuances of screen-based interactions, it can be disorienting to address broader UX challenges with a substantial physical component. Although the context is new, much can be learned from the long-standing history and principles of industrial design. Technology evolves rapidly, but the underlying qualities that define the products we love have not changed.

In the past, one could often draw a clean line between hardware and software. As that edge blurs, industrial and interaction designers need to combine their expertise and learn from each other. In the 1990s, the emergence of the Web led designers to develop new interaction patterns for an entirely new medium. A similar definition of best practices is needed for this era, drawing from expertise embedded across multiple disciplines to create an integrative set of practices. Intertwining physical and digital experiences into a unified and coherent whole requires designers of all types to stretch and learn. Industrial designers need new sensitivities toward complex system states, remote interactions, privacy considerations, and the open-ended potential of how input can map to output. Interaction designers need to embrace physical and spatial possibilities, consider a persons whole body, and use new forms of feedback less reliant on a screen.

The goal is not that interaction designers should all become industrial designers, or vice versa, but that these two design disciplines should find an overlap of skills and approaches appropriate to a world where the traditional distinctions between physical and virtual are increasingly blurred. Effective collaboration and professional overlap requires respect and understanding of each others disciplines. Because the UX community includes people of such richly varied backgrounds, a grounding in the field of industrial design is often lacking. This book aims to bridge that divide using tangible examples, organized into seven design principles, to illustrate processes, products, and points of view from industrial design practice. Through these case studies, interaction designers and UX professionals can find inspiration for how to approach, frame, and evaluate their work as it extends beyond the screen and into the physical world.