101 Things I Learned® in Product Design School

An engaging, enlightening, and cleverly illustrated guide to product design, written by experienced professional designers and instructors.

Products are in every area of our lives, but just what product designers do and how they think is a mystery to most. Product design is not art, engineering, or craft, even as it calls for skills and understandings in each of these areas—along with psychology, history, cultural anthropology, physics, ergonomics, materials technology, marketing, and manufacturing. This accessible guide provides an entry point into this vast field through 101 brief, illustrated lessons exploring such areas as

• why all design is performed in relation to the body
• why every product is part of a system
• the difference between being clever and being gimmicky
• why notions of beauty are universal across cultures
• how to use both storytelling and argument to effectively persuade

Written by three experienced design instructors and professionals, 101 Things I Learned® in Product Design School provides concise, thoughtful touch points for beginning design students, experienced professionals, and anyone else wishing to better understand this complex field that shapes our lives every day.

Martin Thaler practices globally as a product design consultant and is professor of industrial design at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

Sung Jang is an artist, industrial designer, principal of Sung Jang Laboratory, and associate professor of industrial design at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Matthew Frederick is a bestselling author, instructor of design and writing, and the creator of the 101 Things I Learned® series. He lives in New York's Hudson Valley.