Product design: Art or Engineering???

If you watch James Bond movies like me many times and try to remember every dialogue I will bring your attention to a situational dialogue in Die Another Day. The villain gets on plane after show casing ICARUS and tells the person who is working on the machine, “This is still a suitcase, make it small – have you not heard about ergonomics”. I draw your attention to the word Ergonomics here which means “Ergonomics is about designing for people, wherever they interact with products, systems or processes. We usually don’t notice good design (unless perhaps, it’s exceptional) because it gives us no cause to, but we do notice poor design.” (Ref: http://www.ergonomics.org.uk/learning/what-ergonomics/)

We want our phones to look fancy and cute. How does a phone manufacturer or for that matter a product seller know what sells best and why? That is where design of product comes into picture. Have you ever heard of a man named “Sir Jonathan Paul "Jony" Ive”?? I never heard of him too.. but wondered the famous Apple Inc that become a iconic company& how was Apple designing products. Naturally I typed in Google Apple Designer and Voilà came up with a wiki page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Ive ) about Jonathan Ivy, the Man behind the Apple’s Industrial Design Group.

For an IT person in me the products’ software capabilities are amazing, , however the engineer in me is pleased by their gorgeous looks and the joy of handling them and using them..

Human body is a marvellous engineering model. Anything I see right from a cooking utensil to a chair or any product is designed by someone. This is where I started thinking – So product designing is it an art or engineering?

In our daily life we use so many things from morning till evening -- a toothbrush, bucket, towel, shoes, a  vehicle, office desks, laptops, stairs, elevators, and finally the bed we sleep  -- In every one of them a design principle is used.  

 A friend shared the knowledge with me recently that designers use a grid and align everything during the process of ‘designing’ a product.

When a developer does not code that exactly the way the designer envisioned, the Designer might get upset. This is where my confusion started, as usually only artists get upset when their vision is not fully presented; like a dance master when the disciple do not perform the mudra perfectly, an artist when the painting is not making sense to him, or a sculpture when he/she cannot make a stone come alive.

Here is what finally I ended up with:  for any product be it in Software or in physical world, it is important to bring together art and engineering. It’s a natural confluence to make best products.

With Engineering comes innovation and with innovation you can become an entrepreneur. How do you bring both of them together??  That is where we from Eat Sleep Drink Start-ups (ESD) present The August Fest 2014 celebrating art and entrepreneurship. The dates: August 30^th and 31^st 2014. Venue: ISB Hyderabad. See you all there (http://www.theaugustfest.com/ )