A Comparative Study of Pirnia’s Principles in Architecture and Artifacts of Industrial Design Style

The industrial designer is always in transition between different roles in industry and art. From Charles Ames’s point of view, industrial design is a statement of goal. When the goal has been achieved, it can be judged as a work of art if the design is good enough. Gosili presented industrial design basics by presenting the criteria of shape and form, application, ergonomics, function, culture, aesthetics, visual communication, and innovation. A deep connection between architecture and industrial design has caused these two areas of design to have common styles. According to Sottsass, one of the most successful Italian architects and industrial designers, “Industrial design is micro-architecture.” It can be said that architects work in large volumes and industrial designers work in smaller dimensions. In the field of traditional Iranian architecture, professor Pirnia’s studies in the field of Iranian historic architecture and his proposed principles are very valuable. Five principles have resulted from his efforts in scrutinizing the traditional Iranian architecture, including Inwardness, Human Scale, Self Sufficiency, Avoiding Non-essentials, and Structural Rigidity, and Homogeneous Proportion. This research has four

first, evaluating industrial design styles according to product design criteria; second, evaluating Iranian historical products in different eras; third, investigating the possibility of applying professor Pirnia’s principles with the basics of product design and eventually determining the position of Iranian historical products in prehistoric, historical and Islamic eras in comparison with industrial design styles.

In this study, the data was collected by interviewing ten industrial designers who were experts in styles and movements. After studying a brief definition of each style, the interviewees, educated in the field of industrial design, were asked to comment on the five products designed in this style, according to the product design criteria and in the form of 5- point Likert scale. A total of 43 industrial design styles and movements were evaluated. One or two products from each style or movement were furniture because most industrial design styles have produced products in this field. The obtained data were analyzed using Spss 23 software. In order to evaluate the historical products of Iran in different eras, which are three prehistoric, historical and Islamic, the five principles of professor Pirnia were used. Industrial design experts rated the historical products of these three eras based on the five principles of professor Pirnia and in the form of a 5-point Likert scale. Then the exploratory factor analysis of the data was performed. According to the exploratory factor analysis on evaluating industrial design styles with product design criteria and Iranian historical products with the principles of professor Pirnia, the expert’s opinions were categorized to man, art, and industry. In this regard, the Iranian products in three historical eras with industrial design styles were compared in three-dimensional space by installing a plugin called Kamakura analysis tools in Excel 2010 software and a Scatter chart. Then, the distance formula between two points in the space was used to determine the distance between each style with historical products.

Exploratory factor analysis on evaluating the styles and movements with product design criteria and the results of assessing three eras of historical products with the principles of professor Pirnia were valued 0.731 and 0.637 in the KMO test, respectively. This confirms a balance between the data and variables. Therefore, it is not necessary to delete variables to achieve a higher value. The value of the Bartlett test with an error level of less than 0.05 is also significant, which shows that the correlation matrix of factors with variables is not a single matrix. In this part of the study, three factors were made from a set of eight variables in the first part and six variables in the second part. Since the made factors follow the concepts of man, art, and industry, they were named with these titles according to the experts’ opinions in the interviews

By measuring the distance between each historical era of Iran with industrial design styles and movements in a three-dimensional diagram, it is possible to compare the traditional Iranian products with their respective cultural and geographical criteria with industrial design styles. The chart analysis shows that throughout history and with the genesis of different styles and movements of industrial design, the importance of art has decreased regarding the negative slope of its trendline. In contrast, the importance of man and industry is incremental regarding the positive slope of its trendline. Regarding the historical products of Iran, over time, human participation in the products has decreased, while the role of industry and art has become more important. This research enables researchers to evaluate each type of product based on these three criteria and estimate the product style in comparison with Iranian historical products or industrial design styles and movements. Determining the style of the artifact can reflect the designer’s view and purpose to some extent.