Complex and fractal components in industrial design

Abstract

Industrial design is an applied art where the aesthetics and the usability of products may be improved. During the 20th century, we have seen an interesting transformation in our society from hand-made consumer goods designed and made by skilled craftsmen to mass production using new materials and technologies. Design aspects specified by the industrial designer may include the object’s overall shape, the location of the details with respect to one another, colours, textures and ergonomics. Often, through the application of industrial design, a product’s appeal to the consumer is greatly improved. Industrial design consists of the ideation of a shape or configuration, or composition of a pattern or colour. An industrial design can be a twoor three-dimensional pattern used to produce an object. For many years designers were inspired by Euclidean geometry and Euclidean shapes (e.g. triangles, squares, Platonic solids and polyhedra), and it is not surprising that industrial design objects have Euclidean characteristics. The evolution of materials (e.g. steel, plastic, glass) and technologies (from hand-made products to Computerized Numeric Control) have permitted designers to overcome the limits imposed by Euclidean geometry. Thus, modern design studies apply complex shapes and fractal geometry to create new kinds of objects that have futuristic shapes. The aim of this paper is to present some examples of industrial design objects that are analysed using the complexity and the fractal geometry.