Practicing Industrial Design: Design Intent Part One
The professional landscape of industrial design is evolving in response to increasingly complex societal challenges. This raises pressing questions about how designers engage in practice within globally distributed production systems and how they articulate design intent so it carries from concept through development to use. While design intent is often discussed implicitly in industrial design, adjacent fields—including product engineering, architecture, civil engineering, and CAD—employ more explicit strategies for defining and employing it.This chapter first examines how these fields think about design intent within professional practice. It then presents reflections from a group of experienced industrial design practitioners who are also educators, who analyze how they identify, communicate, and embed design intent in their own work. The findings suggest ways in which industrial design practice can move towards articulating and developing design intent as a clear pathway for novice practitioners to move from concept to production in systematic, efficient, and meaningful ways. This chapter forms part one of a two-chapter exploration positioning design intent as a catalyst for the transformational potential of industrial design (see Educating Industrial Designers: Design Intent Part Two).