Industrial Design & Constr history

The Department of Architecture was established in the School of Engineering in 1912.

A distinctive achievement of Auburn’s architecture program was the graduation of several women as early as the 1920s.

In 1927, the School of Architecture and Applied Arts was formed.

Anne Swainson formed the Bureau of Design at Montgomery Ward in 1931.

A typical career path for the first generation of product designers might have included a job at the 1933 fair or for a car manufacturer, then employment at Sears, Roebuck or Montgomery Ward, followed by work at a consultancy or for a manufacturer.

Sears, Roebuck opened Department 817, its Merchandise Testing and Development Laboratory, in 1934.

Also in 1937, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign began its industrial design program.

The Eames Molded Fiberglass Chair won second prize in the 1949 International Low-Cost Furniture Competition, primarily for its innovative base that allows it to adapt to different uses and environments such as nursery, office, home, or school.

The stamped steel version of the Eames Molded Fiberglass Chair (1950) features a smooth and continuous organic form, unique in appearance and extremely comfortable.

He worked for consultants Dave Chapman, Barnes & Reinecke, and Raymond Loewy before opening his own office in 1952, where he designed aviation and construction equipment as well as consumer products.

Henry Dreyfuss, Designing for People (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1955), 82–83.

In 1965 the University of Illinois at Chicago opened its industrial design program.

His interest in universal accessibility extended to graphics as well, as evidenced by his 1972 book, Symbol Sourcebook: An Authoritative Guide to International Graphic Symbols, in which Dreyfuss catalogs and promotes the use of internationally recognizable symbols over written words.

In his book Designing Interactions, IDEO cofounder Bill Moggridge relates a story about designing the first laptop computer, the GRiD Compass, in 1979.

In 1983, Apple released the Lisa, its first computer to utilize a GUI. A year later, it launched the Mac, which became the first GUI-based computer to gain wide commercial success.

That changed in 1993 with the launch of the Mosaic web browser, which brought to life Tim Berners-Lee’s vision for the World Wide Web.

Jasper Morrison’s Air-Chair (1999) takes reduction of parts to the extreme, as it is constructed out of a single piece of injection-molded polypropylene.

Konstantin Grcic’s Chair_One (2004) uses a die-cast aluminum process to achieve an original form that is at once full of voids, yet very solid; angular and sculptural at a glance, yet surprisingly more comfortable than it looks.

Bill Moggridge, Designing Interactions (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2007).