On product design
or, what’s in a word?
When I told my high school college counselor I wanted to major in industrial design, she looked at me curiously and ventured, "You want to design... factories?" I immediately stopped calling it "industrial design" and switched to "product design."
This works well when speaking to non-designers, but completely backfires when speaking with fellow creatives. It’s a funny moment when halfway through a conversation you realize you and your companion have been using the same words but talking about two completely different things. (This typically comes to light when you start talking about things like calipers and CAD.)
How it happened that UX/UI designers came to use “product design” to describe their work as well, I don’t know. And it doesn’t even seem that helpful: one still has to navigate what UX, UI, IA, IxD, and all the other permutations mean.
Yes, an app or service is as much a product as a new coffeemaker, and digital products and physical products should certainly be developed hand-in-hand. Design thinking is applicable across the board. But the technical skills and know-how required to develop an app are vastly different from the technical skills and know-how required to produce a coffeemaker, and it seems we do everyone a disservice when we overlook that fact for the sake of a catchphrase.
As it turns out, the very thing I love about design – the diversity and complexity of the field – might be its Achilles’ heel. I don’t mean to suggest the solution is specialization (far from it, in fact!) but I do believe there is value in specificity of language. With “product design” out, I’m bringing “industrial design” back.
What do you think?
Note: these views are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of Nemera or the Insight Innovation Center.