101 Things I Learned in Product Design School

A hundred and one crisp lessons that demystify what product designers actually do — a field that borrows from psychology, anthropology, ergonomics, materials and more. A friendly on-ramp to the discipline's institutional facet: how the profession comes to understand and teach itself. The book sets out 101 brief, illustrated lessons showing that product design is not simply art, engineering or craft, even though it draws on skills from each of these along with psychology, history, cultural anthropology, physics, ergonomics, materials technology, marketing and manufacturing. Topics include why design is always performed in relation to the body, why every product is part of a larger system, the difference between clever and gimmicky, and how to use storytelling and argument to persuade. Sung Jang and Martin Thaler, both industrial design educators, wrote it with Matthew Frederick, creator of the wider 101 Things I Learned series.