Visual Culture Research On Industrial Design

We are now at an age that images become the dominant factor of culture, the so-called visual culture age, surrounded by increasingly rich visual images. The rise of visual culture is an inevitable result of modernization. And it has become the core bond of contemporary culture fission under the wave of globalization. From the perspective of visual culture, the industrial design, which put the functional modeling as its main task, build the world of spectacles of products in people’s daily life. Because of its attractive look and special ways of visual construction, product becomes a visual text filled with formalism, functionalism, meanings and particular ways of seeing.Visuality is the core character of visual culture. When we doing researches on industrial design from the perspective of visual culture,"visuality of products" becomes the most basic concept. The surface structure of products’visuality refers to products’visualized exterior, reflecting the integration of function and form, and the integration of art and tech. The deep structure refers to the inner mechanism in the seeing of product, mainly including the social dimension constructed by modern-postmodern, economic dimension by production-consuming and the subject dimension by designers-public.As the overall penetration of visualization to our everyday life, there is a trend of aestheticization of it. The industrial design is just the practical art about aestheticization of everyday life. So, it is our everyday life that build the scenes and environment of products’seeing. As the object being observed in everyday life, the products’exterior is something that can be observed, concerning taste, style, beauty, usefulness, the feature of symbol and so on, meeting the need of people’s self-representation and the pursue of aesthetic life. Obviously, this kind of product seeing during everyday life is in the range of understanding of design language, and accomplished through the holistic cognitive of products’exterior. Aim to attract people to see the products, the stores provide the exhibition spaces for products. Varies design exhibitions become the way to show the aestheticization of products. And the advertisements become the most important display media to recommend and rebuild the products.Along with the digital technology development which progresses by leaps and bounds, a large number of digital products, which were made by the digital technology, formed the new landscape of products in our daily life. As the digital information carrier, what digital products should do is to transmit, store, organize and decode information. And there are obvious differences between digital products and traditional products. So, on the surface layer, habit layer, as well as the significance layer, digital products connect the software and hardware with interfaces, and create real visual experience in virtual space, which is different from traditional product. This not only shows the digital products’images, but also represents the culture characteristics such as the new electronic expressionism, the informationize lifestyle, the consumerization of technology.Thus, we can find out that, from industrial society to the information-based society, industrial design turned from visibility to invisibility. Specifically, this deep shift mainly reflects in the following:in the aspect of product attributes, a transformation happened across from real to the virtual; in the aspect of design contents, occurred from the tangible to the intangible expansion. And accordingly, the cultural practice of products is also showing swerve from form to meaning, materiality to non-material and products to service.The visual turn of industrial design indicate that in the future development, the products need to inject some new things beyond vision, and the new sensibility will become the new standard.