What does a product designer do?
Product designers design many of the things that we commonly use in our day-to-day activities, from toothbrushes to kettles, DIY tools to cell phones, vacuum cleaners to laptops. A product designer’s role includes making things easier to use, perhaps by improving particular aspects of a product’s function; making products more efficiently, by exploiting the latest manufacturing and technological developments; making products cheaper to produce by utilizing new and innovative materials; or enhancing a product’s emotional appeal through exploring and pushing new aesthetic boundaries.
The work of the product designer involves at its core some form of problem-solving. It typically starts with a problem statement given to the designer by the client, or the company involved can initiate the statement in-house. Generally speaking, product design problems have a set goal, some constraints within which the goal should be achieved, and some criteria by which a successful solution can be judged.
There are three main categories of product design: routine, where everything the designer needs to know is provided; variant, where some aspects of a brief are open to development; and creative, a more unusual scenario where new products or inventions are required.
Product designers are heavily involved in the process of taking a product from a description of users’ needs and wants to a developed brief, making initial sketches, preparing detailed drawings, making models and working prototypes. In recent years, the role has moved beyond its traditional hard skills of concept modeling, new product development, styling, and product graphics to embrace newer soft skills such as branding, CAD (computer-aided design), trend and forecasting, and graphical user interface (GUI) products based on the foundation of qualitative user and market research.
In general, a product designer today observes people, listens and asks questions, holds conversations with people (end users, manufacturers, clients, managers, engineers, and so on), generates design ideas, communicates them to others, explores and evaluates, makes and tests prototypes, produces detailed drawings, and possibly becomes involved in the final manufacture of the product(s) itself.
Finally, another important aspect of design to be emphasized is the role of the client. The client expects the designer to interpret the problem set before him or her and contribute to it perhaps by highlighting sub-problems and opportunities that the client has initially overlooked. The client also expects the designer to resolve these problems, while at the same time dealing with issues of form, materiality, aesthetics, and manufacturing, among others. The client–designer relationship works in two ways: the client expects the designer to consider other problems that may arise during the design process, and the designer expects a certain degree of freedom and flexibility to interpret and define new problems and issues that the client may not have considered. For this reason there is always, not unsurprisingly, an element of tension between the two. Both are dependent on each other and both are anxious about the other exerting too much control. The harmony of their relationship is therefore a hugely important factor in the successful development of new products.
The DC24 Dyson BallTM upright vacuum cleaner is a good example of variant design, where some aspects of the design brief were open to development.
Are product designers artists?
It can be hard to separate design from art. This is particularly difficult today given the rise in the number of “celebrity designers” producing one-off pieces for design shows and auction houses across the world, or even to exhibit limited-edition pieces in galleries, just as artists do. The products of design are often seen by the public as works of art and designers themselves are often referred to as artists. In recent years, the creative processes involved in art and design practice, and the talents required to participate in them, have undoubtedly come closer.
The Tournament, designed by Jaime Hayon, 2009, a leading proponent of DesignArt. Here, 32 handcrafted ceramic pieces are created in a oversized chess set, which was launched at the London Design Festival. Hayon’s work regularly blurs the boundaries between design and art.