Hasta La Ideas

On the occasion of the 2013 IDSA International Conference, the National Endowment for the Arts is pleased to present a new report on industrial design practice in the United States. “For nearly four decades, the National Endowment for the Arts has used federally collected data to portray the demographic and financial characteristics of artists as workers.” Entitled Valuing the Art of Industrial Design: A Profile of the Sector and Its Importance to Manufacturing, Technology & Innovation, the document thoroughly presents facts and figures related to the profession of industrial design.

Design is a field with a large and extensive presence in our nation’s manufacturing and services industries, as documented by the national datasets that provide the basis for this report. Designers are prolifically inventing new products, processes, and systems that have a profound impact on our economy and civil society.

Drawing largely on data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), supplemented with data from the Census Bureau, the report provides a near-comprehensive survey of the economic significance of Industrial Design, as well as projections about its growth over the next decade or so (these predictions are look to 2020 as they are based on data from 2010). At 830,000 practictioners, design comprises the largest proportion of that group, nearly 40%; it’s worth noting that industrial (or commercial) designers are considered to be artists, where engineers would not be—a long-debated topic that came up at various points during the Conference—alongside “fashion, floral, graphic, interior, and set designers as well as merchandise displayers.” In fact, the Valuing the Art of Industrial Design largely takes an optimistic outlook on industrial design’s symbiotic relationship with manufacturing and invention (i.e. patents), acknowledging the profession’s hybrid role:

At first glance, it may seem as though industrial design has little to do with the National Endowment for the Arts. After all, industrial design clusters around the commercial enterprises of manufacturing and industrial design services. But that view would be shortsighted. While the Arts Endowment does not award grants to for-profit companies, it does support the schools that train industrial designers and the museums that display and interpret design to the public.

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