Isn’t every industrial designer fueled by creative passion? Well…not always.
It takes hard work, courage, knowledge, talent and vision to design a product that embodies your personality. Designing with passion means that you are willing to make a bold, creative statement that reflects your sense of taste and appreciation of beauty expressed through your design. You are also willing to run the risk of being rejected, criticized, possibly ridiculed, or laughed that by those commenting on your creation.
A rejection of your design is symbolic of a rejection of you as a person and can be hurtful at times. It’s much easier to design products with no investment of your personal values. You can shield yourself from the feeling of rejection since you had no vested interest in the final design. However designs that are developed by committee decisions, function or cost typically have a generic appearance and go unnoticed in the marketplace.
Designing with passion requires a designer to draw on his or her emotional and intellectual resources and creatively express them in the design solutions. This exercise becomes a personal mission during which exhaustive energy is expended seeking many design alternatives that appropriately fulfill one or more visions for the product.
These concepts are either rejected or further developed throughout the creative design process. A designer may experience moments of intense creative output followed by a long period of no activity, which is eventually succeeded by the additional creative outpouring. These cycles continue until one or more concepts have been developed which satisfy one’s inner emotional anesthetic sensibilities.
Passion brings focus and refinement to a design project
Design concepts can be compared to a partially focused image that represents some form but lacks many details and thus is somewhat oversimplified in its delineation. Continued design refinement is required to develop these embryonic ideas into fully defined forms that represent all levels of aesthetic and functional requirements for a product.
It is vital for designers to maintain control throughout the overall design process. Successful designs and works of art all share similar characteristics. Passion is also required during phases of development to preserve the vision and enhance the overall design by appropriately detailing all the nuances associated with this function and performance.
These activities require a more concentrated focus on proportion, controlling subtle relationships between features throughout the product, and maintaining continuity of all the features to form a cohesive unified overall form.
These common traits typically include a dominant overall form that is crafted in subdivisions with proportionally supported forms that have some relevance to the dominant form.
Products, which are designed as a visually random assemblage of components or features with no relevance to one another, appear confusing to the viewer and are either forgotten or ignored. Conversely products with little or no features can become so transparent to the viewer that they are also forgotten and become merely background props in everyday surroundings.
Hopefully, this brief introduction into the mind of an industrial designer has enlightened you to the many layers and complexities of the thought process required to achieve successful designs. If you would like to contact me with your comments please call or email paloian@idsys.com.