History of Product Design

Designers at Moment have a wide variety of backgrounds, from graphic design to film to architecture and I am no different with a background in industrial design. While the products we’re designing now are produced in a very different way than those that I worked on as an industrial designer, the core of what we’re doing is the same – trying to design something that is valuable to the people who will use it and the business that produces it. The design process of industrial design has heavily influenced our process here at Moment, and as the digital product design space matures, the parallels between industrial and digital product design appear to be growing stronger. Designers have been applying their skills to the development of software for thirty to forty years and in that time the process has come a long way. However, designers have been creating manufactured products for at least a hundred years longer. So with that history, what have we learned? And what else can we still learn?