Toward the end of her freshman year at the U. of I., Michelle Kwak found herself floundering. Having aced all her advanced placement classes at Lemont High School (in suburban Chicago), she was caught off-guard by the rigors of her engineering courses, and turned to one of her deans for guidance. He knew that Kwak considered art her main hobby, and suggested that she check out industrial design - a program she had never heard of.
"I looked at it online, and the light bulb went huzzah!" Kwak says. "I had no idea there could be a major that takes engineering and art and combines them into one. It was like the heavens opened up. It was everything I wanted."
Most people, like Kwak, are not necessarily aware of industrial design as a discipline. Yet we all experience industrial design - good and bad - every day. If you've ever said you have a "favorite" office chair, paring knife or writing utensil; if you've ever paid extra for a can opener because it has a beefy handle or cursed your new microwave because the buttons don't make sense; if you've ever thrown away a travel mug because it dribbled coffee down your shirt - you have some understanding of industrial design.
Jonathan Ive, the vice president of design for Apple, has defined successful industrial design as design that's so logical, so intuitive, it seems "inevitable." Apple products have raised the profile of industrial design in recent years, but they echo an aesthetic established in the 1950s by Dieter Rams, the chief design officer at Braun, where he had a hand in shaping everything from shavers to shelving units. Manufacturers have long used designers to develop their products, and the U. of I. has been training industrial designers longer than any other public university.
Established in 1937, Illinois' four-year industrial design program has consistently ranked among the top 10 in the U.S. Among its noted alumni:
- Ralph LaZar and Walter Herbst, who earned BFAs in 1951 and 1959 respectively, founded the international design and development firm Herbst, LaZar, Bell Inc., whose clients included Sunbeam, GE, Whirlpool, Brunswick Bowling and Billiards, and Sears. LaZar now works as a visual artist, and Herbst, chairman emeritus of the firm, is on the faculty of Northwestern University's McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science.
- Bill Stumpf, who earned a BFA in 1959, designed Herman Miller's earliest ergonomic office chair, the Ergon, as well as (with Don Chadwick) the Equa chair and the iconic mesh-surfaced Aeron chair, which is part of the permanent design collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
- Jerome Caruso, another 1959 graduate, has designed everything from Motorola LCD watch modules to the first mass-produced stacking chairs made in the U.S. as well as the Herman Miller Reaction and Celle chairs. He is best known as the first and only designer for appliance manufacturer Sub-Zero, which transformed refrigerators into luxury "kitchen furniture."
- Craig Vetter, who earned his BFA in 1965, used his student work as the basis for his own successful line of motorcycle fairings, called Windjammer. These days, his focus has shifted to sustainability, and he sponsors motorcycle fuel-efficiency races.
- Bryce Rutter, who earned his MFA in 1981 (and Ph.D. in kinesiology in 1987), is the founder and CEO of Metaphase Design Group, specializing in ergonomic design of consumer and medical devices. The firm has designed Oral B toothbrushes, Gatorade bottles, Allegro cookware, Microsoft's Intellimouse, and the Bayer microlet - a lancing device that enables diabetics to check their blood glucose levels easily - which received a Design of the Decade award from Businessweek.
Many of these designers were taught by Edward Zagorski, who earned his BFA at the U. of I. in 1949 and returned to teach, leading the program from 1951 through 1988. Zagorski devoted his genius to hatching novel challenges to spark his students' creativity. They designed shoes for walking on water, a machine that would strike and light a match in exactly 10 seconds, and packaging in which to mail a hand-decorated blown-egg to Poland using minimal postage.
His most famous challenge was inspired by astronaut John Glenn's 1962 trip into orbit: Zagorski asked Vetter, a student at the time, to create a way to launch a raw egg 200 feet into the air and then splash down into the Krannert Art Museum's reflecting pool. Students had to design protective capsules for the eggs. The winning entry featured a timed firecracker attached to a missile that blew apart in midair, emitting a shower of tiny American flags and a parachute that lowered the capsule into the water, which dissolved an aspirin tablet that had been holding apart electrical contacts, sparking a miniature motor to propel the capsule to shore. The spectacle was featured in a three-page spread in the April 12, 1963, edition of Life magazine, and the "egg drop" quickly became a staple teaching tool of engineering schools and even elementary schools worldwide.
Zagorski, now 91, described his method for teaching industrial design in his memoir, titled "Get Ten Eagles" (the first step in a proposed design for a flying machine): "Good designers never grow up; they always seem to think like children," he wrote. "That's because the child in us makes us creative, allows us to see things with a sense of wonder."
Industrial design has evolved over the decades, expanding from its original role as a cosmetic touch that gets applied to an existing contraption into a more holistic involvement in the early stages of product development, according to Deana McDonagh, the chair of the program. "Traditionally, an engineer would hand over a 'proof of concept,' like a Wallace and Gromit device, and then the designer would say, 'OK, I can make this look good.' " McDonagh said. Now, designers are included earlier in the process to provide insights that might not occur to the engineers. "Their creativity is dampened because they've got this weight of knowledge, and we come in and look at it from another angle. Industrial designers ask some very fundamental questions that design engineers and other experts may not think to ask."
Even the humblest, most straightforward product may be used differently by different consumers, McDonagh said. She proves her point with an ongoing informal survey in which she probes new acquaintances ("usually after a glass of wine") with questions about their preferred techniques for using toilet paper. "Toilet paper is a simple object and we all think: 'The way I use it is the way everybody uses it.' But I have found that there are folders, scrunchers and wrappers," she said.
Industrial design students are encouraged to cultivate this kind of unrelenting, omnivorous, aggressive curiosity. Professor David Weightman promises students that if they ride a bus, drive a car or spend a night in a motel, they will discover 20 products that need to be designed or redesigned - "if they're curious. And developing that curiosity is really important," he said.
Nan Goggin, the director of the School of Art and Design, said industrial design is now the school's largest major. Students admitted to the program typically spend their sophomore year mastering basic forms and creating models, their junior year producing projects and entering design competitions, and their senior year focusing on one thesis design, often using computer modeling and 3-D printing to investigate and develop a product.
"It's really interesting how much more popular I.D. has become in the past few years, because kids now know what that is," she said.
Parents, however, don't always understand this hybrid avocation. Professor Cliff Shin, who joined the U. of I. faculty in 2010, recalls having to hide his interest in industrial design from his own father, an electrical engineer who hoped his son would follow his path. Shin enrolled at Arizona State University as a manufacturing engineering major, but happened to stroll through the student union on a day when the industrial design department had an exhibition on display. "It was an instant 'Wow! That is what I want to do!' " Shin said. He became a double major, hiding his art courses until his father asked for a transcript.
Shin went on to win honors in an international student design competition and to work for LG, where he designed several home appliances, including a front-loading washer and dryer that received Consumer Reports' highest rating. ("Now my father thinks my talents are OK," Shin said.)
On each project at LG, Shin said, he worked with a team that included engineering, marketing and design. "Industrial design cannot be done with one discipline; it's multidisciplinary," he said. "I.D. is a mixture of philosophy, psychology, economics, social science - all kinds of things."
Their uniting expertise is empathy - the yen to place themselves in the role of the consumer, even for products they're unlikely to use. Weightman had a student who was so interested in firefighting equipment, he enrolled in a course at the Illinois Fire Service Institute on the U. of I. campus. "They put him in some very hot and smoky places," Weightman said, "and he had a better understanding of what it was like to wear that gear." The student noticed that the bracket holding the firefighters' oxygen tanks tended to snag, so he designed a rounded clasp. He won a district merit award from the Industrial Designers Society of America as the best design student from a Midwest college.
McDonagh teaches a course called Disability and Relevant Design, in which able-bodied students are required to do "empathic modeling" by spending a day or more navigating campus in a wheelchair, on crutches, with vision-reducing glasses or otherwise incapacitated. Some designers in the course don't need to pretend: Graduate teaching assistant Sheila Schneider, who has retinitis pigmentosa, uses a service dog.
Kwak, the former engineering major, is spending her summer working as a design intern at the John Deere office in the U. of I. Research Park, and looking forward to her senior year. She is glad she changed her major, even though I.D. isn't any less rigorous than engineering.
"I would actually say it's harder, because it's a nonstop thing," Kwak said. "In engineering, I would study for an exam, and once it was over, it was done. But as a designer, I feel like I'm never really satisfied. I'm always going back and tweaking my projects, just to improve them a little bit more. You stay up until 3 a.m. not because you have to, but because you want to. You design because you love it."