Henry Dreyfuss: "the industrial designer's designer"
There are those who feel that discussion of industrial design does not belong on these sites, but to the extent that this factor influences a company's ability to capture new markets it is definitely relevant.
There is an excellent article on Henry Dreyfuss, the industrial design genius who helped John Deere overtake International Harvester as top manufacturer of farm tractors (discussed in message 1129 on this topic), by Evelyn Jablow at nystyle.com. In the article, Dreyfuss is credited for being the designer who "took industrial design beyond external aesthetic changes into the realm of 'fitting machines to people'". Jablow's article also describes how Dreyfuss left his mark on 4 decades of Bell telephones, the shape of the Honeywell home thermostat, Polaroid instant cameras, Big Ben alarm clocks for Westclox, and the really big one: coordination of the interiors and exteriors of passenger trains for New York Central Railroad, actually creating the "streamlined" decade in the process.
What I found most interesting and relevant in the article is contained in the following quoted passage: "(Dreyfuss) was never interested in styling for styling's sake. His five tenets of design, which he loved to tick off on the fingers of one hand, were, 'First, convenience of use, including utility and safety; second, ease of maintenance; third, cost of manufacture and distribution; and fourth, merchandising and competition. And last, but not least, we consider appearance.'"
Considering that these design principles came from a master designer, it's reassuring to observe how well Go2Net's websites and business practices appear to conform to these principles, and bodes well for GNET's future. |
