A Brief History of Industrial Design

What is industrial design?

Industrial design is the discipline that decides how a mass-produced product looks, works and gets made. It sits between two sets of constraints that rarely agree: what the person using a product needs, and what a factory can produce consistently, at volume, at a cost the market will accept. The World Design Organization describes it as a strategic problem-solving process for products, systems, services and experiences (WDO). For a closer look at the discipline itself, see our companion post on what industrial design is.

How long has industrial design been around?

People have always made things. Industrial design began when we started making the same thing thousands of times — and had to decide once how every copy would turn out. The timeline below covers the shifts that shaped the discipline: what changed, why it changed, and what it still means for a product in development today.

A second story runs alongside the first. Each gain in how efficiently we make things has eventually raised a harder question about what those things cost: in materials, in waste, and in the claims made about them.

1785–1801Swappable parts

Eighteenth-century muskets were fitted by hand, so no two were alike, and a broken part had to be made to fit. In 1785, Thomas Jefferson watched Honoré Blanc, who made musket locks in France, put together locks from parts picked at random. The parts had been made to a standard and could be swapped from one lock to another. Eli Whitney's better-known 1801 version of the demonstration was staged — his parts were marked in advance — but the principle held. Standard parts meant products could be assembled quickly by less specialised workers, and repaired by replacing a part rather than the whole. (American Heritage, History.com)

1860s–1900sArts and Crafts pushes back

Over the following decades, the "American system" of standard parts and precision machine tools moved out of the armouries and into the production of everything from sewing machines to farm reapers. Goods once made one at a time became cheap and plentiful, but often poorly made. William Morris saw the factory system behind them as dehumanising, both for the people working in it and for the objects it turned out. He and the Arts and Crafts movement answered with handmade work, and an argument that how a thing is made and how good it is can't be separated. The movement didn't slow industry down, but it put a question on the table that every later designer inherited: who sets the standard for a mass-produced product? (Invention & Technology, V&A, V&A)

1907A manufacturer hires a designer

The German electrical company AEG retained architect Peter Behrens as artistic consultant, and he went on to shape its products, its advertising and its factory buildings. Design had moved from decorating finished goods to defining what a manufacturer made — a consulting relationship that is still common in industrial design. (Die Neue Sammlung)

1913The moving assembly line

Ford's engineers turned car building inside out. Instead of workers moving around a stationary chassis, the chassis moved past workers, each fitting a few parts. By early 1914, the plant was turning out a finished Model T every 93 minutes, against 12½ hours per car under the old stationary method, and the savings let Ford keep cutting the car's price. It also changed the economics of design: a decision made once on paper was now repeated on every car that came off the line. Ever since, the costly mistakes in a product have been the ones nobody caught before production. (The Henry Ford, History.com)

1919Bauhaus

Founded in Weimar in 1919 under Walter Gropius, the Bauhaus came to train designers to work with industrial production rather than in spite of it, letting function lead form. In 1925, the year he took over the school's cabinet-making workshop, Marcel Breuer designed the first version of his B3 club chair, reducing the upholstered club chair to a frame of bent steel tubing — an idea he took from the handlebars of his bicycle. (Bauhaus-Archiv, Tate, Harvard Art Museums)

1924Light bulbs engineered to fail

The world's major lamp makers formed the Phoebus cartel and set a 1,000-hour life for a standard household bulb, down from the 1,500 to 2,000 hours that had been common. They then spent years of engineering effort making bulbs fail on schedule. It is one of the earliest documented cases of what would later be called planned obsolescence: a product deliberately designed to wear out so it would be bought again. (IEEE Spectrum)

1927–1930sDesign becomes a selling point

In 1927, Macy's in New York held a well-attended Exposition of Art in Trade, showing modern products, many of them from the 1925 Paris exposition. Demand from the public and manufacturers was strong enough that architects, stage designers and package designers turned to mass-produced goods and took the title "industrial designer." Through the 1930s, designers such as Raymond Loewy and Norman Bel Geddes gave everyday objects the streamlined look of trains and aircraft, from kitchen mixers down to a Loewy pencil sharpener that never went past the prototype, whether or not anything about them moved. (IDSA, PBS, Christian Science Monitor)

1942–1956A wartime method becomes furniture

Prompted by a friend, Navy surgeon Wendell Scott, Charles and Ray Eames developed a moulded plywood leg splint for wounded servicemen, lighter than the metal splints in use and closer to the shape of the leg. They presented it to the U.S. Navy in the autumn of 1942, and the Navy placed an initial order for 5,000. The difficulty was the shape itself: following a leg means a compound curve bending in two directions at once, which had eluded earlier designers working in plywood. The Eameses made close to 150,000 splints by the end of the war, and that process became the basis of their furniture, including the 1956 Lounge Chair and Ottoman that Herman Miller still makes. The product people remember came out of a manufacturing problem nobody remembers. (LACMA, Cooper Hewitt, Eames Foundation, Herman Miller)

1946Plastics move into the home

Earl Tupper started with polyethylene slag, a waste product of oil refining. He purified it and injection-moulded it into light, airtight food containers whose lid was inspired by the lid of a paint can. Tupperware went on sale in 1946 but sold poorly in department stores, because people used to glass and ceramic containers could not work out how to use the seal. It sold once it moved to home demonstrations, later Tupperware parties, where someone showed how it worked. It helped turn plastic from an industrial material into an everyday one. (Smithsonian Magazine, Invention & Technology, Science Museum)

1954Planned obsolescence gets a champion

In 1954, giving a talk to an advertising club in Minneapolis, industrial designer Brooks Stevens used "planned obsolescence" as his title. He defined it as "instilling in the buyer the desire to own something a little newer, a little better, a little sooner than is necessary." He did not invent the phrase: Bernard London had used it in the title of a 1932 pamphlet, Ending the Depression Through Planned Obsolescence. Stevens made it a description of the designer's job, and presenting design as a sales tool was controversial at once. (Milwaukee Art Museum, IDSA, Project Gutenberg)

1955Designing for people

Henry Dreyfuss, whose office designed telephones for Bell and Honeywell's round wall thermostat (1953), published Designing for People in 1955. It was the first publication of "Joe" and "Josephine", charts of average human body dimensions his office used to fit products to the people using them. He is credited with pioneering a user-centred approach to design, and the charts drew on standards from wartime human-factors work, a forerunner of ergonomics. (IDSA, Smithsonian Magazine)

1961Dieter Rams leads design at Braun

Rams joined Braun in 1955 and became its head of product design in 1961. With Hans Gugelot he designed the SK 4 radio-phonograph (1956), a plain box under a plastic lid. For Vitsœ he designed the 606 Universal Shelving System (1960), which Vitsœ has made ever since and sells as a system you can add to and rearrange over many years. In the late 1970s he set out ten principles for good design, among them that it should be understandable, honest, long-lasting and environmentally friendly. Set against planned obsolescence, they describe the opposite brief: products worth keeping. (Vitsœ, Vitsœ, Vitsœ, SFMOMA)

1957–1995Designing on screen

In 1957, Patrick Hanratty at General Electric developed PRONTO, one of the first commercial languages for programming numerically controlled machine tools. In 1963, Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad, submitted as his PhD thesis at MIT, let a user draw and manipulate shapes directly on a screen with a light pen. Together they mark the start of computer-aided manufacturing and design. In 1995, SolidWorks brought 3D CAD to standard Windows PCs. Today a product's 3D model is the record its tooling — the moulds and dies a factory makes parts with — is cut from. (American Machinist, Computer History Museum, SolidWorks)

1971Design for the Real World

Victor Papanek opened the book with: "There are professions more harmful than industrial design, but only a very few of them." He blamed designers for unsafe cars, "permanent garbage" and polluting materials and processes, and argued they should turn their skills to real needs rather than trivial products and built-in obsolescence. First published in Swedish in 1970 and in English in 1971, it made the designer's responsibility for what happens after the sale part of the profession's vocabulary. (Alice Twemlow, EBSCO)

1987The first commercial 3D printer

Chuck Hull's company, 3D Systems, released the SLA-1, which built parts layer by layer from a liquid resin hardened by ultraviolet light. Hull developed the process, stereolithography, because prototyping took too long: a prototype plastic part could need an injection mould that took six to eight weeks to make. Designers could now hold and test a physical part long before committing to tooling. (ASME, 3D Systems)

1998The K-Cup

Keurig's single-serve brewers and K-Cup pods went into offices in 1998 and caught on fast. By 2013, Green Mountain was producing 8.3 billion pods a year, only about 5% of them in recyclable plastic, and most ended up in landfill. In 2015, the pod's inventor, John Sylvan, told The Atlantic he sometimes felt bad that he had ever made it. In January 2022, Canada's Competition Bureau concluded that Keurig Canada's recyclability claims were false or misleading: outside BC and Quebec, municipal programs did not widely accept the pods. Keurig Canada agreed to pay a $3 million penalty and change its claims and packaging. The product was designed around a single use, and the claim about its end of life ran ahead of the infrastructure that would have to deliver it. (Boston Globe, Mother Jones, Entrepreneur, Competition Bureau)

2002–2004End of life moves to the drawing board

In Cradle to Cradle, architect William McDonough and chemist Michael Braungart argued that products should be designed from the outset to come apart. Their materials would then either return safely to the soil or be recovered at high quality for new products. Two years later, British Columbia's Recycling Regulation made producers responsible for collecting and managing designated products after use, a responsibility the province says starts at the beginning of a product's design. Together, the idea and the regulation pointed the same way: once a company is paying to take its products back, how easily they come apart becomes a design decision with a cost attached. (McDonough, BC Laws, Government of BC)

2010Designed here, made there

By 2010, according to UN estimates, China had displaced the United States as the world's largest manufacturing country. For designers, it confirmed what was already common practice: a product is often designed on one continent and tooled and built on another, so the drawings, specifications and samples that pass between them carry most of the weight. (Congressional Research Service)

2023–2025The rules catch up

Quebec banned the sale of goods with planned obsolescence in October 2023, and from October 2025 also barred techniques that make goods harder to maintain or repair. The EU's Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation entered into force in July 2024. It sets up a framework for design requirements across almost all physical goods, including durability, repairability and product information. Since June 2024, Canada's Competition Act has required claims about a product's environmental benefits to be based on an adequate and proper test. (Publications du Québec, European Parliament, European Commission, Parliament of Canada, Competition Bureau)

NowToday and beyond

Plenty is still unresolved. Global plastic waste more than doubled between 2000 and 2019, to 353 million tonnes, and only 9% of it ended up recycled. The OECD names product design among the upstream policies needed to change that. The rules are still settling too: in March 2026, less than two years after introducing them, Canada narrowed its greenwashing provisions, dropping the requirement that claims about a business's environmental performance follow an internationally recognized methodology. And with design and production so often far apart, the decisions that matter most still have to survive the trip from studio to factory intact. (OECD, Parliament of Canada, Competition Bureau)

From the studio

I founded ANCORD Design Co in Victoria, BC, in January 2018, and a lot of how we work traces back to this timeline. A decision made in CAD repeats on every unit that comes off the line, so we try to catch the expensive ones before tooling. We let the material and the process shape the form, down to a wall thickness a mould can fill or a seam a sewing partner can repeat.

A product has to fit the person using it, gloves on, in the rain. And how long it lasts, whether it can be repaired, where it ends up and what was claimed about it have always been part of the design, whether anyone planned for them or not. We plan for them from the first sketch.

Alex Nagel, Founder & CEO

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