Chapter 1 of 24
Niels Diffrient, 1984
About three and a half years ago I took the initiative to design, to the degree that I left a very successful business on the basis that the philo- sophy that I had been developing over a career really needed the freedom of being on my own, because of the freedom that existed within the furniture profession for designers, so that seemed like a place I could express some applied thoughts that I have been working on for quite a while about.indus— trial design. Industrial design is a thing of course very enigmatic, in some people's minds, but basically to me it's the design of products for everyday use that are mass—produced. And this is the key word. But you have to embrace the limitations of the process which is of course those things that can be stamped, cast, rolled, formed and extruded through what we call tooling. Tooling is a very expensive foundation for the manner of manufacture. In short, you put large volumes of money up front, build elaborate jigs, fixtures and dyes, and as a result you obtain parts that are often quite complex, but, for the price of each, are very inexpensive. Now this immediately puts a burden on the designer to the degree that he must consider working very closely with engineers, both of the theoretical, prac- tical and manufacturing categories, but also with marketing people, management people, and all of the specialties that go into the modern corporation. But because designers currently have been limited to aesthetic training largely, then they generally don't have this command of the fundamental nature of the product. And this is where I felt there was room for taking the initiative in design, to move more towards what has traditionally been known as the functional side of the design equation, and I relate that to the old axiom 'form follows function'. And we have mostly been obsessed with the form side of it and not the function side.