In many cases, designers and manufacturers have grown apart. The industrial design profession has been diluted to superficial conceptual thinking about everything that needs designing. It has become a noncommitted occupation, leading to – with some excellent exceptions – innumerable useless products that increasingly add to our waste mountain.
The design ‘discipline’ increasingly seems like a fleeting expression of applied art for the individual, rather than a service to industry allowing for the production in series of products that are affordable and accessible to many.