“The essential function of our profession [design] in our society is to enhance and cultivate communications toward an easier understanding of ideas and complex problems, in the shortest possible time for higher visual and auditory retention of data.”
“For design is about the making of things: things that are memorable and have presence in the world of the mind. It makes demands upon our ability both to consolidate information as knowledge and to deploy it imaginatively to creative purpose in the pursuit of fresh information.”
“To design is to plan and to organize, to order, to relate and to control. In short it embraces all means of opposing disorder and accident. Therefore it signifies a human need and qualifies man’s thinking and doing.”
“To design is much more than simply to assemble, to order, or even to edit; it is to add value and meaning, to illuminate, to simplify, to clarify, to modify, to dignify, to dramatize, to persuade, and perhaps even to amuse. To design is to transform prose into poetry.”
Industrial Designers Society of America
The Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA) is the world's oldest, largest, member-driven society for product design, industrial design, interaction design, human factors, ergonomics, design research, design management, universal design and related design fields. IDSA organizes the renowned International Design Excellence Award (IDEA) competition annually; hosts the International Design Conference and five regional conferences each year; and publishes Innovation, a quarterly on design, and designBytes, a weekly e-newsletter highlighting the latest headlines in the design world. IDSA's charitable arm, the Design Foundation, supports the dissemination of undergraduate scholarships annually to further industrial design education.
The Society has an international presence with local chapters in 27 different locations, all providing opportunities to meet other designers, learn and get inspired. There are 16 special interest groups representing diverse topics from Design for the Majority to Materials and Processes, Ecodesign to Young Professionals. IDSA has roots that reach all the way back to 1938, before the age of plastics and at least 30 years before the age of electronics!
IDSA has a small national staff based in the Washington, D.C. area which supports the member-driven activities of the Society. Connected to and collaborating with all other design societies, IDSA is discussing with them the formation of a U.S. design policy.