The profession was invented to make factory products beautiful enough to buy twice.
Before the 1920s, engineers designed products for function and factory workers built them. Appearance was an afterthought. The profession of industrial design emerged when manufacturers realized that two functionally identical products would sell at different rates if one looked better on a shelf.1
The first generation of American industrial designers came largely from theatrical set design and commercial illustration. Raymond Loewy, Norman Bel Geddes, Henry Dreyfuss, and Walter Dorwin Teague each opened consultancies between 1927 and 1930, offering manufacturers a new service: making products desirable.2 Loewy redesigned the Coldspot refrigerator for Sears in 1934, and sales increased dramatically. The refrigerator’s function had not changed. Its curves had.
The profession formalized rapidly. The first industrial design program in the United States was established at Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1934.3 Henry Dreyfuss published Designing for People in 1955, arguing that the designer’s job was not decoration but the study of how human beings interact with objects.4
The role created a new kind of professional, someone whose job was neither engineering nor art but the space between them. By the mid-twentieth century, industrial designers were shaping everything from telephones to locomotives. The profession that began by making factory goods attractive became, within a generation, a discipline concerned with how people experience the built world.