This book provides an in-depth study of the creative and manufacturing processes behind 50 contemporary domestic design objects. Chosen from all around the world, they span furniture, lighting, tableware, textiles and products. Featuring the work of both long-established and emerging designers, each product is selected for its significant use of new technology, unorthodox or complex production process, use of innovative materials (or traditional materials adapted in new and unexpected ways) and, in some cases, for the creative concept behind it.Beginning with a general introduction, each project is then presented through explanatory text as well as inspirational image, sketch, detail shots of production processes and the completed product. A glossary of production methods is also included. “Process” offers an interesting and useful insight into how products are designed for students and professional designers alike.

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Process: 50 Product Designs from Concept to Manufacture @ Amazon UK

Process: 50 Product Designs from Concept to Manufacture @ Amazon US

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below: via Robert Blinn @ Core77

Glossy product design books usually relegate details like ideation sketches, prototypes, parting lines, and injection molds to a supporting role, but Jennifer Hudson’s Process: 50 Product Designs from Concept to Manufacture puts them front and center. Highlighting projects from both up-and-coming designers and design luminaries, Process showcases the hours of effort that disappear behind the scenes and are rarely seen by the consumer. Fifty products are each given about a page of explanatory text and are supported by three or four pages of photographs of early prototyping work. Everything from sculptural vases to functional electronics is shown from its birth as an idea to its eventual manufacture. Process reveals all of the details of industrial design that graphic designers (or book editors) might find a bit dull and it shines because of it.

Products like Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec’s Steelwood chair appeal on an aesthetic level, but seeing the extremely complex molds that press the lightweight metal seat into a functional shape makes the final product all the more impressive. Others, like Maarten Baas’s Sculpt Furniture or Ron Arad’s Bodyguards chairs are strikingly original, but the process photographs showing welders and workers assembling them by hand betray that “industrial” follows a distant second to “design.” A third category, like Joris Laarman’s Bone Chair may not be everyone’s aesthetic cup of tea, but by illustrating the science and mechanics required for their design Process allows the reader to see a simplicity and beauty that may not be obvious from the finished product alone.