The Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design is opening a new gallery focused on incorporating the user experience into industrial design.
User Experience: Products That Shape Our Lives is located in MIAD’s Brooks Stevens Gallery at 273 E. Erie St. An opening reception will be held from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. tonight during Fall Gallery Night.
The exhibition draws from MIAD’s product design collection and a collaboration with Brookfield-based Milwaukee Tool and is intended to highlight how design transforms products from difficult or dangerous to use to the current safer and more powerful models today.
Products featured include household items and appliances, power tools, lawn mowers and consumer electronics like radios, televisions and phones.
MIAD industrial design instructor James Wiemer and Mark Lawson, MIAD director of galleries, co-curated the exhibit with art direction by Dale Shidler, MIAD professor of communication design.
Lawson said user experience has become increasingly important in the design of products.
“People have grown more aware of it, that’s for sure,” Lawson said. “When things started out there wasn’t even a profession of industrial designer.”
The gallery will be open to the public through Feb. 25. Gallery hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday.
