Deconstructing Product Design

Pencil Sharpener

Raymond Loewy, 1933

1. Considered the father of industrial design, Raymond Lowey redesigned everything from Coke bottles to bullet trains. One key to his success was a surprisingly formalized method for balancing the progressiveness of his designs against cultural norms, maximizing prospects for acceptance and commercial success. Raymond Loewy comments: “There seems to be for each individual product (or service, or store, or package, etc.) a critical area at which the consumer’s desire for novelty reaches what I might call the ‘shock-zone.’ At that point the urge to buy reaches a plateau, and sometimes evolves into a resistance to buying. It is a sort of tug of war between attraction to the new and fear of the unfamiliar … ...