Every month we get the IDSA magazine Innovation, and every month I go ballistic.
Every. Month.
Innovation isn't a magazine so much as 100+ page promotional flyer that happens to have glossy pages. It's a thin collection of "articles" promoting one or another product concept where the text is usually written by the product designers. So the articles aren't, you know, reliable reviews. Or even sometimes all that grammatical. But I let that go.
The problem is that every month Innovation features easily a hundred images of products, or product concepts. They're really beautiful too - slick 3D renderings, intensely colorful photographs. And they come fast and furious, sometimes five or six to a spread. The images are typically silhouetted, just the object floating on the white space of the page. Sometimes there's a little Photoshopped-in shadow, just to give a sense of dimensionality.
But here's the weird thing: there's almost never any people in the shots. Or physical contexts of use. It's like the products (most of which are intimately related to the body in some way, like clothing or mobile phones or glucometers) exist absolutely independently from the people and places that inspired their creation. They are a sculptor's dream: pure form disconnected from the messy realities that dent brushed aluminum and put thumbprints on chrome. The white space of the traditional art gallery has become the white space of the magazine page. It just whispers of...
...pointless self-absorption, frankly.
I know this critique is nothing new. But c'mon. In the 174 pages of the "2006 Yearbook of Industrial Design Excellence," there were 37 pictures of people. Which makes for .2 pictures of people per page. That includes images of disembodied appendages like hands, feet, and heads. It also includes figurative representations of people, such as sketches and line drawings. (Like everybody's favorite representational trick: the blank line drawing composited with photographic imagery). It does not include photographs of the designers themselves, unless those designers appeared to be physically engaged with the product. Most product images had no images of humans; the 37 images I counted came disproportionately from a few articles, such as the one by ZIBA on their work with Lenovo (10 images!) which was in fact classified in the "research" section.
The problem is that the democratization of access to design tools (thanks, Usenet!) means that more and more people can make pretty pictures of product concepts, write up their own glowing descriptions of how cool their idea is, and email it all into industry mags like Innovation. So I look for proof that there's something else besides formal innovation. Something like: a hint of honesty about the product's shortcomings. Or: a suggestion of engagement with the physical experience of the product's form. Or: scenarios of use that show me what advantage it brings.
I've fought this battle for a while, and the problem seems to be that many industrial designers feel that they're being judged on the perfection of the physical forms they make - so documentation of projects emphasizes form and finish over all. I've been told by one who would know that storytelling and narrative are now at the basis of many industrial design curricula, but you'd never know it from Innovation.