What is Industrial Design?

What explains these different approaches toward industrial design?

The term DESIGN, distributed in Italy by the middle of the last century, it is an English expression industrial design (“design the industry ‘), which refers to the design of objects produced industrially mass-produced (objects, furniture and furnishing accessories, such as lamp, appliances, tools, means of transport, and so on).

This definition appears focused on the quest for a perfect symbiosis between shape and function, a more effective integration and multiples between technological aspects and aesthetic qualities.

For this reason do not belong to the scope of industrial products design in whose design are studied solely functional character and tecnical (gears of machinery, components of an engine or a computer circuits), ignoring aesthetic ones.
Similarly, they are not design all those products that focused on the aesthetic aspect, of research volumetric formal, disregarding the functionality or new technical solutions.

When an existing object is only “revisited” at the aesthetic level, without technical or functional contributions of significant redesign or styling, i.e. a ‘ cosmetic ‘ (as defined by the art critic Gillo Dorfles) aims to renew the image of the object, to encourage consumption, not by making a new project.

This was, for example, in the 1930s in the American car market, where new models were only cosmetic bodywork embellishments.