Customer Reviews

Industrial Design: Materials and Manufacturing

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1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book is intended to give an overview in simple and visual terms, serve as a guide and introduction to this rather complex manufacturing field. Designer must have a good understanding of all manufacturing processes abailable, in order to have confidence that the proposed manufacturing processes is the most economical and appropriate. So, the book tried to give an overview of all materials and manufacturing methods, in order to help students to visualize and develop forms that ultimately will be manufactured.

The contests consist of metal materials, metal forming, metal cutting, metal joining, appearance finishing and coating, plastic materials, resin forming processes, machining parts, joining plastics, finishing plastics, rubbers and elastomers, natural engineering materials, composites, and rapid prototyping.

I disagree with the reviewer from TX. The book is written using terminology that any industrial designer should be familiar with. It would make a good textbook for design students because it gives an overview of many materials & processes. It also has charts and diagrams that make the information easy to digest. My criticisms would be that it could use more examples of final products and detailed descriptions of the materials & processes used, ie case studies. For the price, it is a thin book and could easily include a case study section. I would also like more elaboration in the "charateristics, uses and properties" sections for each material with common pitfalls to avoid.

This book was a textbook for the beginning of my Industrial Design classes, it was quite informative for learning the beginning basics of design and what needs to be looked out for. My second class coupled this book with another to go into more depth about material selection and the process to go through.

It is a useful book in its own right, and with a good instructor or professor the good qualities are enhanced.

The bad qualities are that it is definitely a beginning book for a designer. The book was inconsistent on what it would go into detail about and the overall organization left for a lot of searching to find information on a specific subject.

I expected more from this book. I wanted a book that was written for designers but instead got a book written in engineer-speak with a nice cover (although for the price a hard cover would have been nice). the illustrations look like they are straight out of any other engineering text. "A" for concept, "D" for content. Having said that, there aren't a lot of books to choose from for ID - this may be the best - ... .

Terrible images: is this a book or a newspaper?!
A lot of info about metal processes but that is it. It has some of plastics, a bit of rubber (like one page or something), and nothing else. Come on Jim, Industrial Design is much more than metal or plastic!

Guido.

This book is intended to give an overview in simple and visual terms, serve as a guide and introduction to this rather complex manufacturing field. Designer must have a good understanding of all manufacturing processes abailable, in order to have confidence that the proposed manufacturing processes is the most economical and appropriate. So, the book tried to give an overview of all materials and manufacturing methods, in order to help students to visualize and develop forms that ultimately will be manufactured.

The contests consist of metal materials, metal forming, metal cutting, metal joining, appearance finishing and coating, plastic materials, resin forming processes, machining parts, joining plastics, finishing plastics, rubbers and elastomers, natural engineering materials, composites, and rapid prototyping.

One needs to bring some critical thinking to work as to what one buys and reads. I fully agree with reader Guido. Images are blurred, of extremely poor quality and not truly informative. There is only a small number of examples offered in the book (as if this were an attempt to bring about a touch of reality to a text that would otherwise be even dryer and engineering-oriented). The limited range of materials and processes is not representative of the industrial design practice. Besides, conceptual categories which were employed to organize the book seemed to me quite confusing and not logically classified. The author does show knowledge of the subject. However, his approach is not particularly didactical and complete--and therefore not as useful as it could be. I don't feel this is the right text and the right form for industrial designers. The book, in my opinion, does not live up to the promise of its title and price.