WELCOME TO INDUSTRIAL DESIGN

Dr Sasha Alexander

Director of Academic Program, Industrial Design

The word ‘trailblazer’ comes to mind when reflecting on the dynamic nature of industrial designers within the multidisciplinary teams required to meet the complex demands of a fast-changing world especially responding to positive climate change. Just consider that we view around 300 hundred brands and ads per day but if we were to log all the interactions with industrial designed objects, products and services that number is stratospheric, well, over a 1000 per day with our mobile phones separately accounting for between 2500-5000 touches per day alone – this is industrial design interaction at an intimate, functional, and emotional level. 

Your home will have many more hundreds industrial design interactions – just try opening a door without a handle or flushing your toilet without a button or gesture sensor. Admit it, you would be in trouble without the basics and Industrial Design’s indispensable contribution to health and wellbeing and our built environment would otherwise take the fun out of a lot of rewarding experiences – Playstation gone, mobile phone gone, car gone.

Apple the world’s wealthiest company is an industrial design convert, design powerhouse, and human centred design champion, and their team’s integrated designs and business model mastery combined with online, UX, UI, CX, and IoT platforms continue to exceed customer expectations. 

Our final year Industrial Design student achievements are no exception in pushing industrial design innovation around challenging preconceptions around disability, inclusiveness, sustainability via Circularity, and smart manufacturing, and emotional product design, ranging from the quiet yet impactful, engaged management of childhood diabetes, to sleep relief for medical shift-workers, to low cost renewable energy rural farm mobility in developing countries, and a busker’s workstation as even they have and get ‘the blues’ positively uplifted through music and negatively recurring backpain – until now. Enjoy Widevision #29 which gladly you can’t unsee it once you see it, because it’s great.