THE question used to be, Why not? Now, the question is, Why?
His soft Scottish burr still noticeable after 10 years in Canada, Julian Goss -- acclaimed industrial design guru and department chair at the Ontario College of Art and Design -- is momentarily stumped. But not for long.
When it comes to the industrial design of everything from toothbrushes to iPads, he says the question "Why make it?" is being asked more and more often as the digital age, intellectual property breaches and environmental concerns increasingly clash.
Where designers once dreamed up a better mousetrap because there was a need, says Goss, such a direct approach just doesn't work anymore.
Lamenting the ubiquitous Made-in-China wall of plastic crap available in dollar stores, Goss says designing a better mousetrap, paper clip or even pull tab on a can is no longer a paying proposition. Even if you improve upon it, we're in such a globalized society that someone, somewhere, will see what you did and your design will be copied and manufactured elsewhere in markets over which you have no control. No matter how muscular your legal protection is, the Pacific Rim -- from an intellectual property perspective -- is the Wild West. So improving something is just not a reason to refine things anymore.
Rather, technology has advanced to such a point that designers have moved away from merely answering need to anticipating it and developing products that add value to it. And they re doing it almost instantaneously.
Technology has advanced to the extent that the lead time between identifying an opportunity and taking it to market is drastically reduced due to digitization. We have the ability to send a design to China and have it turned into tooling and manufactured very quickly.
As a result, and this is a personal philosophy, the designer can have an impact on the very moment of engagement. If you're designing a toothbrush, you can influence the quality of that experience. That's incredibly powerful, even though it's just a toothbrush.
"Or a paper clip, or an iPad. In 1899, the paper clip invented by Norwegian designer Johan Vaaler revolutionized office supplies because it came at the perfect timing of public need and manufacturing capability," Goss says. "It's a very pure design, although today we look at it and don't attribute anything to it."
Not so the work of Jonathan Ive, Apple's senior vice-president of industrial design, and the man behind the iMac, PowerBook G4, iPod, iPhone and iPad. Largely influenced by Dieter Rams, a German designer from the 1960s, Ive has arguably influenced the texture of peoples' lives more than almost anyone, says Goss. "He's had a direct influence on the quality and texture of people's experience through the iPad."
Yet there are drawbacks to technology's impact on design, he adds.
"While design work ranges from dreaming up new ideas to recasting old ones, there are designers in Asia whose job is just to design stuff -- stuff that doesn't have a real point, but is sold in dollar stores. The dollar store is a very telling phenomenon. You can go in and get almost anything you need for around a buck, so why would you go to Williams Sonoma?" said Goss.
"And because having designs manufactured in China is so cheap and quick, things that 20 or 30 years ago would have cost an incredible amount of money are just an everyday cost now. But the question goes back to why are we making it? Just because we can, doesn't mean we should."
Rather, designers are increasingly forced to consider ethics as well as the sourcing of materials.
"It's this idea of the triple bottom line," says Goss. "You're working for your user to identify their needs and meet those needs as elegantly and effectively as possible. You're working for the client -- the person who is paying you. But the other client, and this is increasingly relevant, is the planet and the greater good. A good designer is one who takes into consideration all of those elements."
-- Postmedia News
