If I could design anything, the world would be a very different place.
I'd make paper towel dispenser handcranks a little lower, so that water didn't trickle down my arm when I crank out the paper. I'd specify a heat-retaining ceramic for my toilet seat, and I'd embed a refrigerant unit in my pillow so I wouldn't have to flip it over to find the cool spot. I'd design condoms with a little bump on one side of the ring so I can distinguish sides in the dark. I'd design an alarm clock with a moving snooze button that's an easy target the first time, and becomes harder to find with each attempt. I'd design rings with round edges so they don't dig into bars of Irish Spring and get clogged with soap slivers each time I wash my hands.
We here at CORE77 represent Industrial Designers. Our job is to design products--anything and everything mass-produced, from Ferraris to toasters, and furniture to television sets. Industrial Designers dream up products through drawings, sketches, renderings, even doodles, and present these dreams to the manufacturing client, as a vision of what their products should look like.
The inside of an industrial designer's sketchbook often resembles a sort of flattened, compressed mad scientist's laboratory, filled with doodles of present-day products and futuristic objects--two-dimensional daydreams yearning to be transformed into three-dimensional reality. Industrial designers also create ideas with their hands, using studio materials like clay and modeling foam to show what a product should feel like.
While legend has Michelangelo discovering his sculptures inside blocks of marble, industrial designers often find the shape of the latest electronic gadget inside a chunk of clay or foam, or increasingly in a digital equivalent: Alias, SolidWorks, Rhino, Inventor or another of the myriad CAD programs that have come to dominate not just the design and engineering of products, but animation and film-making too. Whatever the material, designers can spend hours or days molding, forming, texturing, evaluating and adjusting their concept model, re-shaping the lines that eventually define a manufactured product, to be handled and utilized by thousands or millions of consumers. When you pop a brand-new product out of the box and touch it, the designer's hands and eyes have already run over that surface, in one way or another, hundreds of times.
For all the different goals designers offer for what they do at work, they can mostly be summed up with these two:
1) to make the product attractive
2) to make the product not be a pain in the neck.
I say the latter because if you think about it, nobody wants a toaster, or a lamp, or an iron. What people want is toast, light, and pressed shirts. You want certain things to happen in your life, like clean hair, good music, and to keep in touch with your friends, and so you have to put up with shampoo bottles, a stereo, and a phone, all of which are designed. These products can be a bunch of stodgy crap that clutters up your apartment, or a hyper-cool collection of objects that subtly enhance your life. The difference is in the way they're designed; the way they look and feel.
Some products look and feel...well...cool, and work well; the designer spent time with the product, refining the lines, testing the functionality. Other products have annoying qualities that can outweigh their usefulness, like coffee tables with corners that draw blood and remote controls that look like maps of Manhattan. The reason that companies keep making these poorly designed products is because people keep buying them. Consumers' inattention to design leads them to continue purchasing crappy stuff because they're not aware of the alternative. They don't realize how ugly the product's going to look in the context of their home and that they'll have a lousy time using it. If you ever couldn't set your alarm clock because you couldn't figure out the Star Trek button display; if you've ever had your finger bitten by a garbage can with a "bear-trap" spring-loaded lid; if you've ever cradled a phone between your face and shoulder and accidentally pressed several buttons with your cheek--then you have an inkling of what we're talking about.
As long as people keep purchasing products like that, with no eye toward how they look and work, the world will remain filled with ugliness, and the failure of things--staplers that require bomb-defusing concentration to reload, lamps that burn your hand when you shut them off, and ambivalent condoms.