Considering the various manifestations of design, we are convinced that the practice of design is constantly expanding.
Its scope includes: exhibition design, print design, clothing design, landscape design that has become fashionable in our country, the market of services of non-subject design, which is a large part of design. Literally in recent years appeared as a separate type of creativity computer design.
Thus, the design of industrial products for a long time is not the only and often not the main task of the designer. Over the past two decades, the practice of design has become extraordinarily complicated, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to draw a line between design and other areas of professional activity of the artist outside of art in its easel form.
Designing fundamentally new industrial products; cosmetic changes in the appearance of industrial products without a serious change in their technical characteristics; creation of a corporate identity, covering all areas of modern corporations; the solution of expositions – all this is now called design and is performed by professional designers.
The pioneer of design can be considered the English artist Henry Cole (1808 – 1882), who in 1845 invented the term “art industry”, which means, in his own words, “fine art or beauty applied to mechanical production. From 1849 to 1852, Henry Cole published the Journal of Design, drawing attention to the profitability and commercial value of projects. However, even earlier, in 1832, the English industrialist and politician Robert Peel called for the use of art to strengthen the competitiveness of English goods.
The beginning of the history of design is reasonably associated by many researchers with the beginning of the artist, architect, designer Peter Behrens in AEG in 1907. With this formulation of the question the previous decades (Ruskin, Morris) are just a theoretical preparation time of the future practical design.
If we consider design as a means of recreating the integrity of the object world and humanizing the technical civilization, then the beginning of the history of design can also be attributed to 1919, when Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus.
For many centuries the object-spatial environment of man was man-made, all objects surrounding him were the result of painstaking and long work of master craftsmen. Everything became different when, by the beginning of the 19th century, objects of mass consumption manufactured industrially began to appear. The physical and spatial environment was no longer man-made; now and then it was created by machines. Machine labor exceeded the labor of the craftsman by many times in productivity, but at the same time, a new problem surfaced: what was carefully filled with an object in the craft workshop could not be “put” into each of the thousands of twin objects ejected from the machine by the conveyor.
The industrial boom led to a break in the unhurried centuries-old rhythm in the development of the object-spatial environment of man.
New objects emerged, not yet rooted in the culture, which gave rise to the problem of adapting them to the tastes of consumers, there was interest in the psychology of the buyer. In addition to this, rapid changes in the object-spatial environment led to the fact that it becomes necessary not only to adapt to consumer tastes, but also to predict these tastes. The awareness of this and other problems caused by the transition from artisanal to industrial production led to the emergence of a hitherto unknown profession of the designer.
In the most generalized form, the definition of design can be formulated as follows. Design is a project art and technical activity on elaboration of industrial products with high consumer properties and aesthetic qualities, on formation of harmonious objective environment of residential, industrial and socio-cultural spheres.
The objects of industrial design are industrial products (production equipment, household appliances, furniture, tableware, clothes, etc.).
Pioneers of design were architects and artists who recognized the new opportunities open to them with the development of mass machine production. They were fascinated by the breadth and complexity of tasks, not comparable with those that were before the artist – mainly to decorate the life of the upper echelon of society.
Although much has been said and written about design, but a single point of view on the essence of design is still not worked out. The fact is that quite often design means the actual activity of artists in the industry, much more often – the product of this activity (thing or system of things), and sometimes – the field of activity organization, taken as a whole. In some cases, “design” is interpreted very broadly and goes far beyond the designation of the artist’s activity to solve the problems of industrial production.