f Rhetoric in industrial design

Based on some of the current proposals interpreting users as the centre of creation in design (Norman, Jordan or Krippendorff), this article raises the question as to what the author defines as the conceptual possibilities and impossibilities (ponderables and imponderables) of industrial design. It explores possible interpretations between the rhetoric world of increasingly competitive and economy-oriented markets and the rhetorical artifices that can be used by the industrial designer in order to accomplish the functional and emotional requirements of products (transformed into a dream come true for the user). In this approach (and through the visitation of some rhetorical phenomena of consumerism underlying the current social, economical and behavioural context of developed countries) the author underlines the intention behind actions of marketing, design, management and mainly economy-oriented policies that guide those countries responsible for the cyclical creation, in the user, of self-identification with a new necessity: attaining a greater happiness through the consumption of a given product. Linked to this phenomenon, there is the framing of several possible balance strategies, for example: the satisfaction of needs of companies/markets and the careful and sensitive suppression or super-suppression of user-consumer needs.

Within this issue, and by resorting to the general notion of rhetoric in design and specifically to the notion of biomorphological rhetoric applied to design, emphasis is drawn to the importance nature may have to industrial design as an inspiring entity of project methodological praxes, which are both efficient from a commercial standpoint and from a functional-emotional standpoint for the user.

In short, considering the above mentioned scope of limitation of different contexts where the new rhetorical-semantic dimension of design is established, this article proposes that the functional-emotional humanization of solutions developed by designers are a result of the harmonization between the subjectivity inherent to professional ethical deontological values, considering the human-user being, and the intrinsic objectivity of strategic-profitable values supporting producing companies, considering the human-user being. This is because (in the author's perspective), today, more than in the past, both actions must always function as a whole.