Post-industrial design

PurplePrice Mag · October 26, 2026 · 3 min read

Post-industrial is the term sociologists use to describe the society that, from the 1970s onwards, moved beyond the age of heavy industry. In the richest countries, wealth no longer came mainly from factories producing goods in series, but from services, information and knowledge. For design, which was born precisely as design for industry, this was a profound transformation: objects changed, the way they were made changed, and even what it means to design changed.

A new society

The first major study of post-industrial society was by the French sociologist Alain Touraine, who published The Post-Industrial Society in 1969. The term became famous through the American Daniel Bell and his The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, published in the early 1970s: work was moving from the assembly line to offices, research laboratories and communication. The 1973 oil crisis and the spread of electronics accelerated the change.

Form no longer follows function

Twentieth-century industrial design was based on mass production: a single model, produced in millions of identical pieces, with a form reflecting the internal mechanism. Electronics changed the rules. A miniaturised circuit has no shape of its own: a radio, a calculator or a music player can look like anything. Sony's Walkman (1979), which turned listening to music into a personal, portable experience, is one of the symbols of this shift: the value of an object lies more and more in the service and experience it offers, not in its mechanism. At the same time, new production technologies made small batches and variations possible, suited to a public that no longer wanted identical products.

Italian "New Design"

In Italy, thinking about the post-industrial was led above all by Andrea Branzi, founder of Archizoom and a protagonist of Radical design. In his book La casa calda (1984, published in English as The Hot House) he chronicled the Italian "New Design" of the 1980s, from Alchimia to Memphis: objects produced in small batches, full of meaning, decoration and emotion, designed for a society made up of many different groups and tastes. In 1982 the Domus Academy opened in Milan, a postgraduate design school with Branzi as its first cultural director and with contributions from Alessandro Mendini, Ettore Sottsass and Pierre Restany: it was one of the first places where design for post-industrial society was taught, from fashion to services.

From product to service

Post-industrial design is not only about physical objects. More and more, designers shape services, interfaces, experiences and systems: a customer's journey through a bank, the use of a website or an app, a company's identity. The personal computer, from Olivetti to Apple, brought design into the world of information, and today interaction design and service design are disciplines in their own right. Thinking about the post-industrial also opened the way to another question: how to produce and consume less, and better, that is, Green design.