Design Definitions: An Introduction for Product Design and Engineering

by Robin McKenzie

This book is a first in a series of introductory books relating Product Design and Engineering.
The following three books describe a history of industrial design (Book 2), models and theories of design (Book 3), and case studies (Book 4).
The author gives a number of reasons for writing this series of books. One reason is that this accompanies a series of taught lectures that the author gives.
However, a more significant reason is that the author believes that there is a separation between the world of Product Design, and that of Engineering.
Product Designers tend to come from an artistic background. Engineers come from a background of mathematics and physics. Broader understanding of what design is, and how to design, tend to be lacking. Designers tend not to have a good understanding of the engineering difficulties with their design. Engineers do not have a broader understanding of the people and situations within which any design is first chosen.
The author, Robin McKenzie, has been involved with engineering all his life: in factories, industrial design and marketing, broader business relationships, and in teaching. He also has an insight into industrial product design. He is therefore well placed to link these two areas of design.
By engineering, the author also includes other technology based disciplines, such as architecture and computer science. The term engineering is used as a short hand description for all these technology based disciplines.
The series of books has been designed to be read one after the other. However, each of the books in this series is free standing, and can be read independently of the others.
In this first book the author introduces the concept of design over three chapters. The main difficulty is that the word "design" has such a wide and loose understanding that the author gives space over these three chapters to identify and clarify what design might mean in the world of product design and engineering.
The first chapter introduces the difficulty of describing what design is, where he outlines three different popular ideas of design: the design of up-market individual items; products designed for the mass market; and, the professional designer.
The author also takes as a starting point an exhibition British Design from 1948 that accompanied the holding of the summer Olympics in London in 2012.
Chapter two explores some of the areas normally associated with design. These include whether design:
is the product or packaging;
is about the artwork;
is a one-off product, or one that is produced many times over;
is a quick process, or a detailed and time consuming process;
is about recreating an established idea, or something completely new;
is from a single designer, or from a team;
is a single item, or a whole environment?
In chapter three the author takes the ideas from the leading writer, John Heskett, on industrial design in the late 20th century. In his book, Design, A Very Short History, he outlines nine areas that can be seen to enclose the discipline of design. These are
1. History of design
2. Utility and significance
3. Objects
4. Communications
5. Environments
6. Identities
7. Systems
8. Contexts
9. Futures, the future of design.
These provide an excellent way of understanding what design includes within it. Robin McKenzie provides a description and critique for each of these different areas. Some these, the author takes uncritically from Heskett. Other, he believes are too narrowly drawn. Yet taken together, these areas provide a clear way of placing a boundary around what might be considered within design, and what might be excluded from design.

180 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 7, 2014

About the author

Librarian note:
There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name