This year’s award-winning industrial designs reflect existing and emerging key trends in the market. Above all, the latest design principles display a deep understanding of user processes.

Design is one of the key components in industrial product development, and the creative engineers behind it are continually looking for innovative ways to meld form and function while distinguishing their work from that of the competition. In 2009, the emphasis was on usability: designing products to maximize the number of opportunities for them to be applied by removing obstacles for end users.

“Strategic design is not about ‘going as far as possible’ but about ‘going the best way together,’” Harmut Esslinger, the founder of Frog Design, told Gizmodo. “At the end of a day, each jointly achieved result shall be a healthy compromise, motivated by achieving the best for the user and/or consumer.”

The goal seems straightforward enough, but it can be approached in myriad ways. Improving a user’s experience can mean increasing modularity, making something unexpectedly portable, providing a simple design for a complex function or merely reducing the amount of effort needed to perform a task. During this year’s industrial design award season, each of these approaches was on prominent display.

Understanding the Operator
Reusability played a major role at the 2009 International Design Excellence Awards (IDEA). Out of 1,631 submissions, 150 won gold, silver or bronze awards, with the Nike Trash Talk, a sneaker made from manufacturing waste, winning “Best in Show” for its sustainability attributes.

However, ease of operability was also a common factor among winning entries, particularly in the “Commercial and Industrial Products” category. This year, the Crown GPC 3000 Series Order Picker, a type of low-level order picker designed for the warehousing and logistics industry, took a gold medal. The new device improves productivity by reducing operator fatigue and improving ease-of-use through highly responsive and quick controls.

Crown claims that “time spent off the truck can be as high as 90 percent of the picking cycle,” so simplifying worker movements on and off the picker boosts overall performance.

Personal and Portable
Individual portability is another important feature highlighted among recent industrial designs. Similar to a compact cherry-picker, the JLG Liftpod provides a personal aerial work platform that serves as an alternative to ladders and more heavy-duty lifting mechanisms. It also won a gold medal from IDEA.

The Liftpod can be powered by a standard 18-volt cordless drill or a specialized power pack, and can lift up to a height of 14 feet while giving the user a 360-degree range of motion. Most surprising is its level of portability: It can be moved around a work site by a single operator and is simple enough to be assembled in roughly 30 seconds. Creating personal and portable devices to fill gaps in the market promises to be an important trend for future industrial products.

Simple and Self-Evident
Some of the best ideas emerge from looking at an issue so common it rarely attracts specific notice. The gold medal-winning TegeraPro Vibration Control gloves combine the notion of simplicity with self-evident purpose, and they make work easier on the hands.

These gloves are designed to resist vibrations from industrial work that may cause long-term injury to an employee’s hands. A foam material insulates the hands and reduces the risk of injuries that can be costly both to an operator and a company in terms of interruptions to work flow.

“So simple, yet so sweet. A product that has effectively wed the usability goal with a self-evident design,” writes Stephen Melamed, a judge for the International Designers Society of America (IDSA), which runs IDEA, and a principal of Tres Design Group.

Although the design concept of “simplexity” isn’t a new trend, it continues to be a major influence on industrial design. The concept is well-represented in the 2009 Annual Design Review by I.D. Magazine, an industrial design publication.

This year, one of the “Best of Category” awards in the equipment section went to the Fluke Ti25 Thermal Imager, an infrared thermal camera that greatly simplifies and streamlines the thermal imaging process without sacrificing functionality. It can render infrared LCD images of building walls, machines and even people, but as I.D. Magazine notes, “the Fluke looks like a hand tool and feels like a Wii controller: simple and light with only a trigger, focusing knob and three buttons.”

Reducing Effort
Removing some of the burden from a worker’s task frees up time for additional projects and improves productivity by reducing fatigue. Effort reduction is a perennial aspect of industrial design, so it’s no surprise the concept was on display in a number of this year’s products.

The Transroller, which won a bronze medal from IDEA, is a device for moving large heavy loads with significantly less strain. It relies on a gravity-activated clamp attached to a set of wheels, allowing the Transroller to grip a sizable load and roll it into place. According to BusinessWeek, “users can move things such as sheet materials in a safe manner and with significantly less effort than in traditional methods.”

Reducing effort doesn’t only refer to physical encumbrance. Saving time in accessing records, files and correspondence can equally improve productivity in a work environment. Hence, I.D. Magazine‘s selection of the Peek for a design distinction in the “Consumer Products” category (also a bronze medal winner from IDEA).

The Peek is a compact handheld device that provides a keyboard and a scroll wheel for accessing either email or a handful of other applications. The narrow range of functions is intended to provide direct and immediate email retrieval without wasted time. As I.D. Magazine explains, “[t]he Peek practically flaunts the limitations of its service.”

The concepts of simplicity, operability, portability and effort reduction, along with several long-term design trends, are maturing. If the 2009 industrial design award season is any indication, we can expect to see these principles making their mark on industry for years to come.

Earlier

4 Key Design Trends

Top 7 Design Trends

Resources

Frog Design’s Hartmut Esslinger on Design in 1979
by Wilson Rothman
Gizmodo, July 17, 2009

IDEA 2009 Design Gallery
International Design Excellence Awards, 2009

Low-Level Order Pickers
Crown Equipment Corporation, 2009

It’s Time to Let Go of the Ladder
JLG Industries, 2009

2009 Annual Design Review Equipment
I.D. Magazine, 2009

15 Best Heavy Duty Designs
by Rich Michiel
BusinessWeek, 2009

2009 Annual Design Review Consumer Products
I.D. Magazine, 2009