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Art professor advises Industrial Design students

An email from an industrial design student inspires a study of the employment outlook for people like him—which does not look good. The author considers a plan for using the product line of etching presses for the nucleus of a new enterprising initiative.

My design for their future

I would like to license my product and services lines to ensure that students with an industrial design inclination be acculturated—enabled to meet changing requirements of wealth creation and redistribution, to add value to the US economy, and to be relevant to society’s educational and recreational needs.

My product and related concepts could be the basis for the students to form a not-for-profit membership organization—working titled Northwest Print Center Incubators—with a range of services reflecting collaborative innovation by designers, educators and industry professionals.

Industrial design defined and economic outlook

Industrial designers combine art, business, and engineering to make products that people use every day or in specialties such as healthcare-related and medical instrumentation, educational technology, games, entertainment and the military. They consider the function, aesthetics, production costs, and the usability of products to develop new product concepts. They imagine how consumers might use a product when they create and test designs.

The outlook for industrial design students today, however, is uncertain—if not downright grim. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment Handbook a year ago, employment of industrial designers is projected to grow slower than the average for all occupations: 2 percent from 2014 to 2024. Salaries will average around $32/hr., or less than $70,000 a year. Consumer demand for new products and styles might sustain the demand for industrial designers but only if they are new. American ID students must be increasingly competitive, too, as more projects are done over the internet.

Education of industrial designers

Typically, industrial design students are only vaguely aware of activities that precede and lead up to design of products. Things like stakeholder vision, business and brand strategy and management at the operational level of technology-led and marketing-led drivers. These 'fuzzy front end' activities are where the real commercial innovation and creativity is—not in some vague, aesthetic consideration or ease of manufacturing.

My work with industrial designers in an art school

At the UW, in the 1970s and 1980s, I proved to be a visionary and my teaching helped students build their careers on my vision. I’m not a genius; I merely permitted and encouraged them to think into the future beyond established curriculum. What worked for them worked for me, but not in the art world. I was invited to jump over to the design division, and one quarter I sponsored a group project by ID students designing a rock-star style bus for a mobile cross-country summer school. It was around 1982.

I retired young in 1985. The “education industry” called to me, and I built on the knowledge of art and technology that I gained in school. Art education is valued and supported as intellectual and technological activity, not just as mere supplier of artists to art patrons.

Later on I combined my printmaking skills, teaching, design and technology to create the Halfwood Press line and related services. The press is an artifact of an old, dying world, but by re-purposing it for the experience economy I found a sizable and extendable market for this and related products and services.

For example, an estimated 15 million people in the US alone experienced hands-on exposure to printmaking in the past half-century. They enjoyed it, and today they have money and time to return—and they buy my presses. To illustrate this, imagine 1% of them descending on Seattle to satisfy their curiosity and creative needs. The crowd will completely fill Safeco Field—54,000 people.

The Northwest Print Center Incubators is my design to bring young creative designers and entrepreneurs together so that they can build up and take ownership of the various enterprises associated with printmaking—not only presses, but entertainment, senior services, early childhood education and games with purpose.