Did I Miss the Boat?

Hi friends,

This past weekend I attended a wedding where I saw some of my dearest friends that I don’t get to see much anymore. Several of them I met in my industrial design program at RISD over a decade ago.

None of them are industrial designers now.

They’re all UI/UX designers.

When I arrived at RISD, UI/UX design was barely a design discipline. The first iPhone was only launched in 2007. Now, it’s one of the most in-demand design jobs. Any company that makes anything with a digital component needs them.

Thanks to that demand, and the near-zero marginal cost of reproduction of digital products driving massive profits for software companies, digital designers have reaped the rewards. It’s a coveted career track for designers and non-designers alike, and it’s well known that industrial design salaries are no match for UI/UX ones.

I used to think maybe I was lucky, or talented, or somehow special to have “made it” in “real” industrial design.

Now, I sometimes feel I missed the boat on digital design.

Should I have pivoted earlier in my career?

Skated to where the puck was going, as it were?

But once that brief, grass-is-greener feeling passes over, several things come to mind that convince me there’s still a bright future for industrial designers, if we can evolve to meet new challenges.

For one, humans still need physical objects. It might sound obvious, but it’s worth noting that all digital products run on a layer of physical ones. Until we’re fully in the metaverse, it’s unlikely demand for industrial design will ever collapse. In fact, as more designers jump on the digital design gold rush, it’s likely that hardware design skills will become scarcer and more valuable.

There’s no denying that screens are now the native language of interaction with technology. However, most products that work with a screen outside of phones, tablets, and computers have terrible interfaces. Ever used a DSLR camera or car UI? Or any smart product that comes with an app that was clearly not made by the same people?

Most interfaces that bridge the physical and digital feel painfully clunky. Digital natives who grew up experiencing the world through their phones will come to expect a level of fluidity between atoms and pixels that we just haven’t yet achieved with most products. As more and more things we interact with on a daily basis involve screens, a key general design challenge will be the integration of digital and physical experiences.

I believe industrial designers are uniquely suited to tackle these challenges.

The core skills and methodologies are the same for industrial design and UI/UX design: understanding user needs, coming up with a wide variety of creative solutions, prototyping, testing, and iterating towards a final design. But industrial designers may have an edge over UI/UX designers in bridging the physical/digital divide.

In design and engineering circles, it’s often said that hardware is hard. There is truth to this. Compared to the infinite sandbox of digital design, industrial design is highly constrained due to material limitations and the demands of manufacturing. This makes every design decision a high-stakes one, and any mistake could cost you dearly in time and money. While software products can be shipped and updated indefinitely, no such grace period exists in hardware.

The unique challenges of designing and shipping hardware rewards structured, methodical design processes that produce confident outcomes. Through these processes, an industrial designer receives rigorous training in their intuition and decision-making capabilities. These skills are highly transferrable skills to digital design. Many of the best UI/UX designers in fact come from industrial design backgrounds.

It is not so easy to go the other way, from software to hardware. It’s not that digital designers can’t have these same skills, but the nature of software development lends itself to a much more fluid and open-ended mindset. This mindset can be disastrous for a hardware development process, where cycles are longer, costs are higher, and decisions are final. You can’t afford to parallel path dozens of solutions in hardware, or update the product once the parts are produced.

Industrial design is a very broad field and and inherently a human-centric discipline. Having been trained in designing for the sensory and ergonomic needs of the user regardless of the medium, an industrial designer is more likely to approach a physical/digital design problem with a wider lens and consider the context and the problem holistically. To an industrial designer, the screen is a part of the product, not the whole product.

Most UI/UX designers tend to have a much more screen-centric mindset. They’re used to solving two-dimensional problems that appear on various sized displays. These skills are much-needed and have shaped the digital world we live in today. But without a deep understanding of physical experience and that critical third dimension, it will be much harder for them to cross freely between the digital and physical.

None of this is to say that industrial designers will suddenly burst onto the UI/UX scene and start eating their cake. While the core skills are transferrable, the nature of digital design problems are entirely different. The solution spaces are larger, the iterative cycles are faster, and each digital screen has more nuanced usability problems than any physical product I’ve ever designed.

Digital design has also matured significantly and there are visual styles, conventions, and best practices that industrial designers just aren’t knowledgeable about. It will take time, practice, and an open-minded approach to cross the divide.

There are certainly designers who will stick to the purely physical. Their skills will be needed and may even grow scarce. But their path will continue to narrow as digital products meld into every aspect of our lives, and they may be forever trapped lower on the value chain as the software economy grows unbound by the limitations of hard goods.

But for those industrial designers willing to embrace a new frontier and apply their skills towards designing holistic experiences that span the physical and digital, the future has never been brighter.