INDUSTRIAL DESIGN: the day design disappeared

Monday morning, every industrial designer on earth vanished. No warning, just gone.

Tuesday looked normal. Factories still ran. Products still launched. Nobody panicked because most people were not entirely sure what they did anyway.

By Friday, small failures started. The latch that pinched. The button you kept hitting by accident. The screen that didn’t get bright enough. People assumed it was a bad batch.

A month in, returns climbed. Products got cheaper but felt disposable. Every release looked like the last one because nobody was left to challenge the safe option.

Six months out, wild ideas stopped surviving the first meeting because nobody could make them feel inevitable. User complaints were vague - “nothing feels right” anymore. Social media channels that celebrated new products started to shut down because they simply ran out of things worth talking about.

A year later, everything still worked. Products were cheaper but development got riskier and more expensive because nobody was derisking decisions before cash turned into tooling. The world did not end. It just got harder to use, harder to love.

This is the world without industrial design. What happens when you remove the thought, care, and love we pour into every product that usually goes unnoticed.