The Shape of Everyday Life: How Carnegie Mellon Revolutionized Industrial Design

What if the objects you use every day, your coffee maker, your vacuum, even your thermostat, weren't just built, but carefully designed to shape how you live? [gentle music] Hello, you're listening to Where What If becomes What's Next from Carnegie Mellon University, where we ask the bold questions that become innovations for the betterment of humanity.

As CMU celebrates its one hundred twenty-fifth anniversary, we're spotlighting 15 CMU inventions that not only changed technology, they changed the world.

We don't usually think about the objects around us, the thermostat on the wall, the vacuum in the closet, the phone in your hand, but every one of those objects was designed carefully, intentionally by someone asking a deceptively simple question: How should this work for a human being? That question helped give rise to the field of industrial design.

And in the 1930s, Carnegie Mellon became the first university in the country to build a degree program around it.

But CMU's approach went beyond making products attractive.

It championed a revolutionary idea, that good design should understand the entire system around an object, how it's manufactured, how it functions, how people interact with it, and how thoughtful design can shape human behavior.

That philosophy would go on to influence a new generation of designers, transforming everything from household appliances to consumer technology.

First, we'll hear from Rachel Delphia, curator at the Carnegie Museum of Art and a Carnegie Mellon alum, to help us trace the origins of industrial design from factory floors in Pittsburgh to the objects that filled American homes.

Then we'll talk with Fred Bould, founder of Bould Design and one of Carnegie Mellon's most influential design graduates, whose work, including the Nest Thermostat, helped redefine what everyday products look and feel like and how they can help make a better world.

Because at its best, industrial design doesn't just make things look better.

It makes life work better.

And when it succeeds completely, the design itself almost disappears, leaving behind something beautiful, intuitive, human, and effortless.