On New Material Culture

Industrial Design is modern craftsmanship

 

Until a few hundred years ago, craftsmen had been the heart of societies. They created tools  to meet humans' needs in their daily lives and rituals. Their workshops were their workplaces, trade points and homes, where they were able to live and connect with people whom they created for.

 

Today craftsmenship has become creation of limited objects mostly used for decoration, since industrialization offered diverse products for masses. With the rise of industrialization, face to face relationship between users and makers had declined and understanding users' emotions and meeting their needs had become impossible to practice. In order to solve this problem, the modern craftsmen came into the scene to fill the gap between industry and people. They created new tools and ways to study human needs and introduced themselves as empathetic creatives.

 

Industrial designers are the modern craftsmen who give form to the world that surrounds not only humans, but all beings and becomes a medium for all to live, experience and form a common culture.

 

Industrial Design is a modern craftmanship that crafts our habitat, changes our expectations from human-object relations and codes our instincts. It builds a human-centric world with its creations, which embodies tangible and virtual experiences. These experiences establish a new social culture with pre-designed emotions, stories, behaviors, even myths.

 

We are witnessing formation of industrial human culture which is designed from scratch to be experienced in our homes, offices, parking lots, airports, highways, pet-shops, parks and our own bodies. These experiences do not last long enough to be passed from older to newer generations and create a common cultural heritage. In fact, they are very momentary (compared to human history) technology-driven experiences that do not last longer than a lifecycle of an industrial product.

 

In other words, we are witnessing a shift in cultural heritage which becomes less about shared stories that are passed through generations, and more about our experiences of product generations..