The inside of an industrial designer's sketchbook usually looks like some kind of flattened and compressed mad scientist's laboratory, filled with doodles of various types of products and, occasionally, futuristic objects--two-dimensional dreams slated to be transformed into three-dimensional realities. Industrial designers also create ideas with their hands, using studio materials like clay and modeling foam to show what a product should feel like.

Michelangelo "discovered" his sculptures inside blocks of marble; industrial designers find the shape of the latest walkman inside a chunk of clay, or foam, or occasionally a computer-driven substitute, like the Alias rendering software used to create the special effects for such movies as Terminator 2 and The Mask. Whatever the studio material may be, designers may spend hours at a time molding it, forming it, adding different textures to it, touching and holding it to see what it feels like, carving and re-carving the lines that will soon be an actual working product, touched and held by millions of users.When you pop a brand-new product out of the box and touch it, the designer's hands and eyes have already ran over the surface, in one way or another, hundreds of times.

I think our goal as a profession is
1) to make the product attractive
2) to make the product not be a pain in the neck.

I say the latter because if you think about it, nobody wants a toaster, or an iron, or an ironing board. What people want is toast, and pressed shirts. You want a bunch of things to happen in your life, like clean hair, good music, and for your friends to able to leave you messages when you're not home, and so you have to put up with shampoo bottles, a stereo, and an answering machine (all of which are designed). These products can be a bunch of stodgy crap that clutters up your apartment, or a hyper-cool collection of objects that subtly enhance your life; the difference is in the way they're designed, in the way they look and feel.

Some products look and feel, well, cool (check out AT&T;'s latest "wavy" cordless phone, one of the first that doesn't look like it was designed on an etch-a-sketch), and work well; the designer spent time with the product, refining the lines, testing the functionality.

Other products have annoying qualities that nearly outweigh their usefulness, like coffee tables with corners that draw blood and remote controls that look like maps of Manhattan. The reason that companies keep making these poorly designed products . . . is because people keep buying them. I think that people's unawareness of design forces them to continue purchasing crappy stuff because they don't realize that there's an alternative. They don't realize how ugly the product looks in the context of their home and that they're having a lousy time using the product. If you just let the clock blink 12:00 on your VCR because you're intimidated by the Star Trek button display, if you've ever had your finger bitten by a garbage can with a "bear-trap" spring-loaded lid, if you've ever cradled a cordless phone between your face and shoulder and accidentally pressed several buttons with your cheek, then you have an inkling of what we're talking about.

As long as people keep purchasing products like that, as long as people seem not to care about and be aware of what their place looks like and works like, the world will remain filled with ugliness, and things that don't work properly--staplers that require bomb-defusing concentration to reload, lamps that burn your hand when you shut them off, and ambivalent condoms.