Editing Industrial design (section)

===Precursors===
For several millennia before the onset of [[industrialization]], design, technical expertise, and manufacturing was often done by individual [[Craft production|crafts people]], who determined the form of a product at the point of its creation, according to their own manual skill, the requirements of their clients, experience accumulated through their own experimentation, and knowledge passed on to them through training or [[apprenticeship]].{{sfn|Noblet|1993|p=21}}

The [[division of labour]] that underlies the practice of industrial design did have [[precedents]] in the pre-industrial era.{{sfn|Heskett|1980|pp=10-11}} The growth of trade in the medieval period led to the emergence of large workshops in cities such as [[Florence]], [[Venice]], [[Nuremberg]], and [[Bruges]], where groups of more specialized craftsmen made objects with common forms through the repetitive duplication of models which defined by their shared training and technique.{{sfn|Heskett|1980|p=11}} Competitive pressures in the early 16th century led to the emergence in [[Italy]] and [[Germany]] of [[pattern books]]: collections of [[engravings]] illustrating decorative forms and motifs which could be applied to a wide range of products, and whose creation took place in advance of their application.{{sfn|Heskett|1980|p=11}} The use of [[Technical drawing|drawing]] to specify how something was to be constructed later was first developed by [[architects]] and [[shipwrights]] during the [[Italian Renaissance]].{{sfn|Baynes|1991|p=108}}

In the 17th century, the growth of [[artistic]] patronage in centralized monarchical states such as [[France]] led to large government-operated manufacturing operations epitomized by the [[Gobelins Manufactory]], opened in [[Paris]] in 1667 by [[Louis XIV]].{{sfn|Heskett|1980|p=11}} Here teams of hundreds of craftsmen, including specialist artists, decorators and engravers, produced sumptuously decorated products ranging from [[tapestries]] and [[furniture]] to [[metalwork]] and [[Coach (carriage)|coaches]], all under the creative supervision of the King's leading artist [[Charles Le Brun]].{{sfn|Heskett|1980|pp=11-12}} This pattern of large-scale royal patronage was repeated in the court porcelain factories of the early 18th century, such as the [[Meissen porcelain]] workshops established in 1709 by the [[Grand Duchy of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach|Grand Duke of Saxony]], where patterns from a range of sources, including court goldsmiths, sculptors, and engravers, were used as models for the vessels and figurines for which it became famous.{{sfn|Heskett|1980|p=12}} As long as reproduction remained craft-based, however, the form and artistic quality of the product remained in the hands of the individual craftsman, and tended to decline as the scale of production increased.{{sfn|Heskett|1980|pp=12–13}}