4 minute read
STYLING & DESIGN COMMUNICATION
Styling is an inherent part of industrial design. It does however go beyond giving a pleasant look to a product. Styling may indicate the functionality of a product (‘form follows function’), thus enhancing the cognitive ergonomics. It may also strengthen a brand’s visual language, leading to a coherent brand identity. To teach styling, we teach the history of industrial design and give theoretical classes but we also provide practical tools to design and build styled prototypes.
Further, design communication is an essential activity for design engineers. Good designers do not only think visually, but also act visually. They design communication by efficiently passing on information to the audience. To portray ideas, different tools are brought to the table. We start off with basic techniques such as hand sketching, and continue with more advanced techniques such as surface design, digital sketching in Virtual Reality and rendering. ‘STYLING GOES BEYOND APPLYING A PLEASANT LOOK. IT COMMUNICATES IDENTITY AND FUNCTIONALITY. IT IS ESSENTIAL FOR DESIGNERS TO COMMUNICATE THIS EFFICIENTLY’
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INTRODUCTION INDUSTRIAL DESIGN The course consists of three modules: Sketching, Prototyping and Design skills that cover some fundamental practical and theoretical aspects of design.
Sketching aims to train basic visualisation skills. Sketching techniques are taught through demonstration lessons. Students train themselves to master skills independently by means of weekly assignments.
Prototyping focuses on the materialisation of ideas via manual production techniques. This is trained through a number of short assignments that the students have to execute individually. Each student is coached through practical exercises and design consults.
Design skills focuses on insights in the different phases of the design process, and how to make a design brief, list of demands, morphology chart, function analysis, creativity, selection methods and form exploration. This is trained by interactive lectures and activated learning.
1I0
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GRAPHIC DESIGN COMMUNICATION
This practically oriented module teaches you how to deal with various software and techniques that can be used to visualize ideas and prototypes during the design process. Although there is a theoretical part that discusses a number of basic concepts of computer graphics and photography, you will mainly learn to create 2D and 3D graphic content yourself.
A wide range of software will be used for this purpose: Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and Indesign for photo editing, graphic layout and vector drawing and Autodesk VRED for rendering (lighting of and assigning material to) 3D CAD models. Here you also get an introduction to product photography, in which you learn to photograph your own physical prototypes in a professional way.
2I0
39
HISTORY AND INDUSTRIAL DESIGN
The course consists of two main teaching components: History of Industrial Design and Industrial Design & Formgiving (styling), which are supported by seminars on Visual Communication Design (visualisation). The history component introduces students to the history of industrial design through an examination of circa 150 years of industrial design production, looking at its movements, styles and schools. 40 The styling component introduces students to form language, colour and brand DNA. The students learn how to shape a common identity between product and how form and
color express emotions.
The visual communication component supports the exercises of the main course components with the teaching of advanced graphic design and typographic
3I0
DESIGN, STYLING AND CAID In this module we transpose the automotive design workflow onto a consumer product. We work around a specific product (in the past e.g. helmets, drones, skibots,...) where we develop a complete design language on an individual basis and extract it into a physical prototype.
As input for the design, in addition to requirements linked to product functionality and user interaction, we also use techniques such as emo-design, animaltransfer, moodboards and brand-DNA to develop our own styling.
At the same time we use Virtual Reality and Subdivision modelling to model and iterate these concepts. In a last phase a physical clay model in Kolb Automotive clay is created from which the final concept will be developed. Using a 3D scanner and Reverse Engineering, this prototype will be converted into a CAD model in which all product and technical requirements are incorporated.
4I0
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