History of industrial design

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HISTORY OF INDUSTRIAL DESIGN 
The term industrial design was originated in 1919 by the 
American industrial designer Joseph Sinel. Initially, industrial 
designers dealt exclusively with machine-made consumer products. 
Eventually, however, the scope of the profession enlarged to 
include the design of capital goods, such as farm machinery, 
industrial tools, and transportation equipment, and the planning of 
exhibitions, commercial buildings and packaging. 
Before the Industrial Revolution, goods were handmade by 
artisans, who were usually involved in the whole process of 
creation, took pride in their work, and often sold their wares 
directly to the customer. The development in the 18th century of 
the factory system, with mass production and specialization of 
labor and the appearance of middlemen, changed the situation. 
Factory workers tending machines had little involvement with a 
product and felt no responsibility to the buyer. Factory owners 
were often chiefly concerned with profits. As a result, although 
many products, such as cast-iron stoves and building units, were 
functional, many more were ugly and badly made. Applications of 
machine-made ornament in hopes of disguising low quality and 
pleasing a mass market were usually an aesthetic failure. A few 
late 19th-century reformers, such as the English designer William 
Morris and members of the Arts and Crafts movement, protested 
and advocated a return to the standards of medieval handicrafts. 
They influenced art nouveau style and the Vienna Secession (see 
Sezessionstil) movement, but these attempts at improved design 
had little effect on mass production at the time. 
Another source 
The first use of the term "industrial design" is often 
attributed to the designer Joseph Claude Sinel in 1919 (although he 
himself denied this in interviews), but the discipline predates 1919 
by at least a decade. Christopher Dresser is considered the world's 
first Industrial Designer. Industrial design's origins lie in the 

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industrialization of consumer products. For instance the Deutscher 
Werkbund, founded in 1907 and a precursor to the Bauhaus, was a 
state-sponsored effort to integrate traditional crafts and industrial 
mass-production techniques, to put Germany on a competitive 
footing with England and the United States. 
The earliest use of the term may have been in the following 
work: 
The Art Union. A monthly Journal of the Fine Arts 
Volume One for the year ending December 1839 Published at the 
Art Union Office Catherine Street Strand Page 143 
“Dyce's report to the Board of Trade on foreign schools of Design 
for Manufactures. Mr. Dyces official visit to France, Prussia and 
Bavaria for the purpose of examining the state of schools of design 
in those countries will be fresh in the recollection of our readers. 
His report on this subject was ordered to be printed some few 
months since, on the motion of Mr. Hume.” 
“The school of St. Peter, at Lyons was founded about 1750 for the 
instruction of draftsmen employed in preparing patterns for the silk 
manufacture. It has been much more successful than the Paris 
school and having been disorganized by the revolution, was 
restored by Napoleon and differently constituted, being then 
erected into an Academy of Fine Art: to which the study of design 
for silk manufacture was merely attached as a subordinate branch. 
It appears that all the students who entered the school commence 
as if they were intended for artists in the higher sense of the word 
and are not expected to decide as to whether they will devote 
themselves to the Fine Arts or to Industrial Design, until they have 
completed their exercises in drawing and painting of the figure 
from the antique and from the living model. It is for this reason, 
and from the fact that artists for industrial purposes are both well 
paid and highly considered (as being well instructed men) that so 
many individuals in France engage themselves in both pursuits.” 
The practical draughts man's book of industrial design: was printed 
in 1853. 

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