Industrial Design has a Perceived Value Problem
Hi friends,
Two weeks ago, I dove into why UI/UX designers get paid more than industrial designers. If you haven’t read that post, you might want to go back and do that since this is a follow up.
The TLDR:
💵 Digital designers get paid 20-30% more than industrial designers because:
💰 Software margins can be over 2x hardware margins
😵 The digital economy has doubled in size since 2007
💼 The size of the digital design job market is currently 6x ID
📈 The digital job market is expected to grow at 2x the rate of ID
So say you’re an industrial designer and understand these realities. But you love industrial design and want to stick to it. You don’t want to be stuck behind your digital colleagues in terms of compensation for your whole career.
So, what’s an industrial designer to do about it?
The subjective nature of value
In the previous post, I wrote about how you get paid a portion of the value you generate for others (e.g. your employer or client). This is partly why UI/UX designers, whose benefactors tend to have much higher profit margins than hardware companies and can more easily attribute value to their work, get paid more than industrial designers.
While there are certain market conditions at play, they aren’t directly proportional to the difference in pay. It’s not that a software company with 2x the margins pays their designers double.
There’s another reason industrial designers have been stuck lower on the pay scale:
Industrial design has a perceived value problem.
People, especially business people, do not clearly understand the value that ID can bring to the table in the same way that they often understand UI/UX can. Often, industrial design is thought of as “making it pretty” after the hard innovation and development work is done.
And you can’t really blame them. Compared to UI/UX designers, we’ve done a terrible job of explaining how and where we add value.
First of all, the name. Industrial design. Nobody knows what it is. How can you convince someone what you do is valuable when they start from a point of confusion?
But we’re stuck with that one, at least for now.
In a complex system like product development (both digital and physical), where a multitude of disciplines and resources are coming together to create the final product, how do you know who’s generating how much value?
How much of the value comes from the initial “aha!” idea of the product, without which there wouldn’t be a product at all?
How much is created by the researchers, who identified the user needs to address and make the product useful?
How much is added by the designers, who made the product work well and appeal to consumers?
How much from the sales people who know the offering inside and out and can match customers with the right products? How about the ads?
How much value is from the physical device, vs. the apps that run on it?
It’s actually very hard to quantify. In physical products, often the only data point you have is the number of unit sales. In digital products, you can get more granular data (daily active users, conversion rates, etc.). But at the end of the day, it’s subjective.
Any economist will tell you, all value is highly subjective. Is a $10,000 Leica camera really $9,000 better than a $1,000 Fujifilm camera at taking photos? Is a $2 beer you can get at the corner store really suddenly worth $8 when you step foot into a bar?
Is an industrial designer really adding less value than a UI/UX designer, or is the value just less clear because less people are talking about it and there are fewer metrics to support it?
Price depends on perceived value, context, and the balancing act of what the buyer is willing to pay vs. what the seller is wiling to accept.
In this case, the price is your compensation, the context is product development, the buyer is your employer (or client), and the seller is you, the industrial designer.
There is no direct formula that correlates your compensation with your value-add, because that value is very hard to agree upon. And because its so subjective, how much value you or your discipline is adding (and therefore how much you get paid), can be highly influenced by perception.
Compared to UI/UX designers, who already enjoy more favorable market conditions, industrial designers are way behind in managing that perception.
The “value of design” conversation
In recent years, since the rise of “design thinking”, a lot has been said about the business value of design. This conversation has been generally positive for the design industry as a whole, as it led to more widespread business acceptance of design as a critical function and more understanding (even if shallow) of the design process.
Arguably, it was industrial designers that kicked off this movement, with IDEO bringing user-centric design principles into the mainstream and Apple’s incredible success from putting design at the center of their business drawing the attention of corporations large and small.
But in the present day, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a current article about the specific value of industrial design. Trust me. I did a Google search. There isn’t much from recent years. What I did find was a 2017 Fast Company article that references a National Endowment for the Arts report that called out how under-valued and under-utilized industrial designers are, specifically by small and medium-sized manufacturers (SMMs):
“13% of SMMs were familiar with industrial design; 72% said a lack of knowledge about industrial designers’ value prevents their center from engaging with designers, and over 56% do not have access to industrial designers at all,”
I suspect the lack of knowledge of industrial designers’ value problem hasn’t gone away. It might even be getting worse.
The cited NEA report goes on to suggest three potential courses of action:
“The three core tactics that this report describes as potential actions are:
Raise awareness about the value of industrial design
Provide examples of how SMMs can access industrial design consulting services
Connect designers with manufacturers”
Industrial designers are failing at that first tactic. The current “value of design” conversation and conversation about design as a whole is dominated almost entirely to UX, UI and service design.
Perhaps as a result of this, Google Search trend data reveals that interest in industrial design has been steadily declining since they started tracking (2004), with search interest in UX overtaking ID in 2018, and UI overtaking ID some time last year.
Is that surprising to anyone?
Look at the sheer number of articles published on UX Collective on a weekly basis.
Google search “the business value of design”. Most of the articles on this topic don’t even mention industrial design, but instead focus on UI/UX or “design thinking”.
Compare a professional UI/UX designer’s portfolio with an ID portfolio. You are far more likely to see case studies that cite metrics and statistics that reinforce the business value of what they did, and in doing so, directly linking their work to the profitability of the company.
We can speculate about why the value of UI/UX is so much more well articulated and in so much more abundance:
There are just way more of UI/UX designers now, and their numbers continue to grow (see last post)
UI/UX design, by its digital nature, lends itself to more trackable metrics that can be interpreted as having contributed significant value
Software can be shipped immediately when ready, and the results measured very quickly, whereas hardware tends to suffer from delayed results due to manufacturing lead times, which makes the impact less immediate and clear.
With the growth of software products over the last decade, UI/UX designers have integrated more tightly with their companies as they have grown, becoming a core part of the business and more well equipped to speak to their impact.
But the simple fact is: there are a lot more people talking about UI/UX design and why it’s valuable, and not that many talking about ID and it’s value.
Even a junior UI/UX designer will be able to Google some articles and be able to glean enough information to clearly articulate the value of their work. A junior industrial designer will have a much harder time.
When it comes time to convince an employer or client of the value they bring to the product, who’s going to be better equipped?
Over time, that self-perpetuating cycle affects the perception of employers and even industrial designers themselves, driving up the perceived value of UI/UX roles and driving down the value of ID roles.
Value beyond the object
As industrial designers, we are of course focused on objects. A passion for physical design and useful, beautiful objects is why a lot of us got into this field. But if we are to address the perceived value problem of our field, we need to be able to express it’s value beyond the resulting objects.
If you were an untrained observer, and I asked you to look at a few industrial designers’ websites, some blogs we frequent, and some Instagram accounts, you might conclude that industrial design is all about the beautification of objects. Because that’s what’s emphasized and put on display.
Can we really blame people for thinking industrial design is about “making it pretty” when we ourselves present the most valuable output as the shiny, pretty outcomes like the juicy renderings, the immaculate product photography, and the slick animations?
Why do we designers fetishize the surface-level outcomes? Because it’s easy. It’s easy to point to something and say, “look what I did, and look how pretty it is”. It’s much harder to speak to the real-world impact of the work. This is true of all design disciplines. There’s plenty of UI work on Dribbble that is simply a pretty skin over a bad user experience.
To be fair, I’ve always maintained that the pretty stuff is still important, because that’s what draws people into the work. But once you have their attention, it needs to go deeper than that. It can’t all be surface level or the perceived value will be surface level.
What about the increased sales? What about the material cost saved? What about the innovative feature that users love? What about the sustainability gains through assembly and material innovations? How about the accelerated time-to-market through a well-honed design process?
To change the perceived value of industrial design, we need to think, speak, and write more clearly about how what we do adds value to all parts of the development of products and services. We need to draw obvious connections between our day-to-day work and positive business and social outcomes.
We need to stop objectifying our own work.
P.S This newsletter/blog/whatever has a name now!
Design Things.
Get it? It’s like, things about design but also sort of a call-to-action to go and design things. I thought it was pretty clever.
P.P.S. Since my last post, the subscriber count has grown about 25%, and I’m now at 163 subscribers! Again, thank you so much for reading. If you find what you’re reading here interesting, please help grow this little project by sending it to someone who you think might also find it interesting.