Mark Guarraia, of Providence, a designer at Item Group, sketches on the computer at the company’s Providence headquarters. The company, with about 130 employees, is expanding and has a nine-person office in Hong Kong that serves its international clients.

The Providence Journal / Bill Murphy

If it’s industrial designers you need, Rhode Island is a good place to find them.

According to statistics from the U.S. Department of Labor, Rhode Island has the second-highest number of industrial designers per capita in the United States. As of May last year, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported, Rhode Island had 520 industrial designers. Michigan, which came in number one, had 5,800 designers, but its total population is much larger. Average salary for an industrial designer in Rhode Island was $53,800.

For Stephen Lane, CEO and co-founder of the Item Group, a product development and manufacturing company based in Providence, good industrial design is not only at the heart of his business, but plays a key role in the world economy. Lane said every design job leads to at least five other jobs further along the food chain — in engineering, manufacturing, marketing and distribution.

“A well-designed product sells more than a poorly designed product. I think every industry understands and embraces that. People use design to grow their businesses . . . companies that are design-driven are always in front of the market,” he said.

The Department of Labor defines commercial and industrial design as the development and design of manufactured products.

“It’s a tasty mix of engineering and art,” said Aidan Petrie, chief innovation officer and the other co-founder of The Item Group. “The designer is translating industrial products for human use. You need a knowledge of manufacturing procedure, human needs, aesthetics, economics. . . it’s a broad-brush profession. The industrial designer is ideally suited in the forefront of the innovation age.”

Lane and Petrie, both industrial design students at RISD, founded the Item Group in 1985. A few years ago, he said, they made the decision to concentrate on medical and consumer health products.

“It’s a very dynamic field, a perfect storm of opportunity,” Lane said. “There are still pockets of the economy that are thriving, and the medical area is one of them.”

Item’s products include the Reach Access daily flosser for Johnson & Johnson, a night guard to protect teeth for a company called DenTek and the Playtex Embrace breast pump.

Lane said the Item Group, which has a nine-person office in Hong Kong, serves an international clientele, which insulates it somewhat from problems in the local and national economy. The company, with about 130 employees, is expanding, and Lane expects it will have about 150 employees by the end of the summer. Item employs about 30 designers; Lane said the company recently hired about five and plans to add about three more.

“We have a very broad definition. Some are working on computer-driven design, some are involved with engineering plastic components, some of them live to do consumer research,” Lane said. “We’re looking for a very diverse palette, all different personalities and skill sets. It’s the diversity that creates the magic.”

Lane said a good industrial designer combines art, engineering, business and a bit of psychology to create a product that works. “It has to connect with the consumer in a way that’s functional as much as emotional. It needs to do both,” he said.

In hiring, Lane admits to a RISD bias, but said the company also hires designers who trained at the Rochester Institute of Technology (more engineering-driven, he said, than RISD), the Cleveland Institute of Art, the Massachusetts College of Art, the Savannah College of Art, and more.

As far as RISD grads go, Lane said, he has a philosophy of “student capture” — hire them right after graduation, and they’re more likely to make their home here. Lane himself is a Rhode Island native.

Lane said The Item Group is a beneficiary of other companies outsourcing their design and even manufacturing work to his company.

“Rhode Island can be a great outsourcing destination. We have large markets in our front yard and our backyard, and we’re in a good place in terms of convenience, and even though people don’t believe it, in terms of cost,” he said. “The scale is right. There’s young talent from Brown, RISD and our other schools. I think we’re turning the corner to have an industry of creative services here. We’re not there yet, but we’re turning the corner.”

Leslie Fontana is chairwoman of the industrial design department at RISD, which has about 225 students. She defines industrial design as the design of any mass-produced object or system. “If ever there was a blend of art and engineering, it’s industrial design,” she said. Jobs for RISD’s industrial designers, she said, range from the fashion world to toy companies, such as Hasbro, to NASA.

“Businesses are recognizing the importance of design and the value of people who have an ability to look at a product holistically,” she said.

Fontana said that in the past industrial designers would draw a product, then make a model in wood or metal to see what it looked like in three dimensions. Now all of that can be done on computers. Fontana said RISD teaches the computer skills but also has its student designers create products the old-fashioned way.

“We still spend time in the wood shop, in the metal shop. Students make a physical product before they’re drawn on the computer. Making things is another way of learning . . . and we’re lucky enough to have the real estate and the equipment that allows us to do that,” she said.

One of the assignments RISD gives industrial design students, she said, is to have them create products for people with a different viewpoint from themselves — children with disabilities, for example — with the idea of trying to trigger an empathetic response from the designers toward the people who will be using a product.

Among current students, she said, environmental concerns are having a large impact, with a corresponding intolerance for waste and pollution.

“We encourage students to think about the impact of what we’re doing . . . you can’t just call something ‘green.’ You need to understand the materials, how they’re manufactured, how they’re used, what the implications are,” she said. “There was enthusiasm for corn-based plastic, for example, but it turns out that growing corn is not particularly earth-friendly.”

Matt Grigsby, a 2005 RISD graduate, along with classmate Joe Gebbia, created an Internet-based company called Ecolect — the name is derived from the words ecology and intellect — to help designers track down sustainable materials. He is also chairman of the Rhode Island chapter of the Industrial Designers Society of America, which started earlier this year.

Grigsby pointed out that Rhode Island has a history of innovation in industrial design that goes back to Slater’s Mill and the roots of the industrial revolution. Grigsby said the state chapter of the IDSA is still in its early phases, but it hopes to serve as a resource that will connect people, foster innovation and help bring business to the state.

“Our mission is not only to get the people who are already here to stay, but to encourage people to move here from other areas,” he said.

Grigsby said an industrial designer often needs to be a jack-of-all-trades.

“A good industrial designer knows a little about everything — engineering, manufacturing, marketing,” he said. “You have to get all those things synced up. One of the advantages of Rhode Island is that you can pull all the right people together. Everything is very accessible.”

In addition to RISD, Grigsby said, Pawtucket-based toy company Hasbro Inc. is “a huge player” in the state’s design community. Duncan Billing, global development officer for Hasbro, said the company employs about 300 designers worldwide, with about 150 in Rhode Island.

“We have a series of great brands, from Transformers to Scrabble, and we rely heavily on brand innovation,” Billing said. “Our designers are the key element to making that happen.”

Billing said Hasbro hires its designers from schools around the country, including RISD, and maintains an extensive internship program. He estimated that 50 percent of Hasbro’s design interns go on to work for the company.

“We’re always looking for good designers. They’re not easy to find,” Billing said. “The most important thing is having a passion about our business, a passion about creating memories for kids.”

asmith@projo.com