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Design+ Industrial design leads to understanding of users

by converting problems into opportunities. There are At that time, this concept of unity in visual material
difficulties in defining the term design because, for the culture was very radical and forefront. Thus, Gropius
people belonging to the design community, this word is deserves to be mentioned due to his core role in ID’s history.
made of a result of acquiring a critical framework for the In a revolutionary way, he considered the artist’s duty to
study and creation of artefacts that are not made of words. confer absolute formal clarity to all the products through
Specifically, design is a process of bringing something which the acts of everyday life are carried out as such can
into an undefined state because industrial designers focus be achieved through the standard, which is the average
mainly on product esthetics and user interface aspects. product for the average. Although Gropius subsequently
migrated to the United States of America (USA) to pursue
For several millennia before the onset of industrialization,
design, technical expertise, and manufacturing were often his investigation on the rational, in Europe we mainly had
done by individual “craftsmen, who determined the form two scenarios. In Italy, the design still developed in parallel
with the discovery of rational architecture, while in the
of a product at the point of its creation, according to their Scandinavian countries, the design and its products began
manual skill, the requirements of their clients, experience
accumulated through their experimentation, and knowledge to succeed, becoming appreciated and exported around the
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passed on to them through training or apprenticeship.” 1, p.21 In world. Therefore, based on Montessori’s method (learning
Great Britain, in the mid-18 century, with the beginning by doing) and thanks to the introduction of semiotics in
th
of the Industrial Revolution (IR) (referred to as IR further the ID field by the renowned institution Ulm School, along
in this paper), the emergence of ID was affirmed thanks to with the information theory and ergonomics, products
the growth of both industrialization and mechanization. made of good design mark the new era of ID (e.g., the Braun
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Due to the increased application of industrial manufacture, Sixtant shaver).
the way products were made significantly altered along 1.1. The influence of the IR on (industrial) design:
with the emergence of a wider middle class demanding A brief summary
fashionable styles. Consequently, with the end of the First
World War, a significant change impacted ID. Particularly, As previously mentioned, IR began in Great Britain and
this event tragically highlighted how much the production subsequently spread to other areas of Europe and even
system was then transformed: in the climate of post-war the USA. It is considered a period of significant changes
reconstruction, the point of synthesis between the various in the economic, technological, and consequently, social
rational European currents was born. Subsequently, the fields. Indeed, IR established the transition from creating
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notion of ID received its definitive definition. products by hand to using machines: therefore, countries
were transformed from agricultural to industrial,
In this unique atmosphere, Walter Gropius founded representing a turning point in human history.
the German School of Design, architecture, and Applied
Arts named Das Staatliches Bauhaus commonly known Among the design fields, the connections between
as the Bauhaus (1919 – 1933), to make it the privileged graphic and (product) design and the IR are particularly
meeting place between art and industry. In the design’s noteworthy, even though the influence and impacts caused
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history, the Bauhaus school represents a crucial point: by the IR are frequently discussed on subjects such as travel,
it was a unique school where all the arts were taught communication, and commerce. For instance, architects
simultaneously and, according to a single idea, buildings seized the opportunity to reconsider how they approached
were designed, paintings were produced and objects building construction in light of advancements in both
(e.g., lamps, armchairs) were studied with rational but technology and manufacturers. Rather, offset printing, a
pleasing shapes, suitable for the industrial production new printing method that enabled the mass production of
without forgetting the craft industry. The prominent printing materials, gave rise to a boom in graphic design.
importance attributed by the Bauhaus to the materials’ In particular, this changed the esthetics and resulted in
study is still crucial for the design: to obtain a successful the dissemination of information widely, which led to the
object, it is first necessary to know the technical rise of newspapers, advertisements, and posters in society.
characteristics of the materials of which it is composed. As consumer culture has grown, there has been a need
The Bauhaus pioneer vision was about the integration of for visually appealing advertising materials (Figure 1 for
the arts with crafts, as well as architecture thereafter. The an example created by one of the Italian pioneers in the
education provided combined arts that were considered advertising sector).
“elite” studies with crafts: this was the 1 time in the world As a result, graphic designers have become increasingly
st
to be done and thought of as a new field of study, named important in creating materials that draw consumers in
design, as it is known nowadays. and encourage them to make purchases. The esthetics

Volume 1 Issue 1 (2024) 2 doi: 10.36922/dp.3929