The Future of Industrial Design in 2023
Hello to 2023!
Last year, around this time, I started writing this industrial design newsletter/blog/I'm-not-really-sure-what-to-call-it. I had never written or published regularly before, and I'm happy to find myself still writing a year later. It's been a refreshing way to collect and distill my thoughts on design and other topics.
Today, I'm trying something new again: making predictions on the future of industrial design over the next year. These predictions are fairly broad and based on trends I've been observing over the last year and discussions with people who know more than me.
Whether I'm right or wrong, I figure it will be fun to write these down and see how things pan out a year from now. Either way, I will learn something new.
Let me know if you have any predictions of your own!
P.S. A big, big thank you to all 556 of you who are currently subscribed to this blog via email. It's been a great year of building my publishing muscle and I wouldn't be doing it without you. If you're not a subscriber yet, you can sign up below:
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1. Sustainable design will become a key selling point
In recent years, I’ve noticed a growing sense of responsibility among consumers and a clearer linkage of our purchasing decisions to the climate crisis. While there has always been a contingent of tree-huggers that would take the sustainable option no matter what, it seems that the majority of consumers are now factoring it into their purchasing decisions and even willing to pay extra for it.
A recent study of 1000 US adults found that 69% considered a product’s environmental impact to be important to their purchasing decision and 66% of consumers and 80% of young adults were willing to pay more for sustainable products.
This shift towards values-driven consumer choices (and thus products on the market) seems likely to accelerate, as numerous research studies have found that Gen-Z cares a lot about sustainability and that is changing the landscape of product design and marketing as they move into their prime purchasing years.
Companies and brands have been taking notice and pushing their products in a more sustainable direction. Even in a product category like consumer electronics (which is especially plagued with climate issues due to the complexity of products, the integral use of nasty materials, and short product lifespans) major brands like B&O and Dell are starting to very visibly explore sustainable design ideas like designing for repair, upgradeability, and use of recycled materials.
None of this is new. We’ve been talking about sustainable design forever. Designers have been proposing modular, upgradeable laptops since laptops existed. But this time, it does feel somehow more like a permanent shift. Maybe because time is running out on the climate crisis. The future of industrial design and humans in general depends on us navigating this successfully.
Industrial designers will hopefully embrace this, and become champions of sustainable design practices and strategies. We are in the exact right place to marry this growing user demand for sustainable products with the business needs of the companies we design for.
We’re already seeing more overtly sustainability driven design studios, like Morrama in London. What used to be the elephant in the room when it came to product development is will become a key selling point that brands look for in their design partners.
2. A renewed focus on unit economics and profitability
Over the past decade, many software startups and tech companies adopted a “growth at all costs” mentality driven by simplified tech stacks, new digital business models, and an abundance of venture capital. The theory was to chase more customers at any cost to achieve market domination and eventually profits would follow, leading to bloated valuations and a myopic focus on growth as the primary metric of success.
This mentality also found its way into hardware companies. Bird ballooned in valuation and reach seemingly overnight, only to then face bankruptcy. Peloton grew exponentially over the course of the pandemic as people invested in home fitness solutions, only to come crashing down, losing almost 95% of its stock value since its 2020 high as demand slowed.
By most accounts, Peloton makes good products, but they spent too much trying to market them and grow to meet the demand. With the inherent lower profit margins and reduced flexibility of a hardware business, when demand contracted, they quickly found out their business was unsustainable.
In 2023, I think we’ll see a shift in focus back to good unit economics and a path to profitability. We’ll see less crazy stuff funded by cheap VC money. Designers who can understand their clients/employers' renewed concerns about the bottom line will do well. Designers who want to optimize for job security should avoid hot startups that are burning cash rather than focusing on product market fit and profitability.
3. Designers will embrace AI (for better or for worse)
The "will AI replace designers" debate rages on. In some ways, it's a moot point; AI is here to stay and designers must adapt or be left behind. Most designers seem to understand that AI will be a tool, not (yet) a replacement for human decision-making or creative direction.
Just a year ago, AI was more of a curiosity than something with real utility. Now, it's hard to go an hour without hearing about how it's changing everything. Development is speeding up and applications are evolving rapidly. The future of industrial design undoubtedly involves AI.
Designers will produce a wide range of outcomes when they use these tools. It's similar to CAD, which was once revolutionary and is now fairly standard. Even now, when CAD tools are quite mature, there is a lot of design work that reflects an limited level of proficiency. AI-aided design work will be the same: a lot of amateur crap that was obviously AI-driven, and some works of true creativity and craft aided by a powerful tool.
AI is great at processing large amounts of input and synthesizing it quickly. Currently, tools are powerful but general. There are chatbots (ChatGPT) and text-to-image-generators (Dall-E, MidJourney, Stable Diffusion, etc.). You get access to immense processing power and capability, but you have to use it in a way that isn't always intuitive. To use these tools in your design process, you kind of have to fit your square peg of a design problem into the round hole AI interface.
The next step function for AI tools will be towards application specificity and ease of use. Future tools will have interfaces designed for specific workflows that leverage this power. Imagine a CAD tool with a built-in AI assistant that can validate your form against reams of ergonomic data for specific segments of the population and provide feedback. Or a rendering tool that could analyze volumes of trend data for a market and come up with 10 different CMF configurations for your design concept.
Incidentally, parts of this post were "improved" by AI. I wrote the draft; I just used Notion AI to proofread and tidy it up. In most cases, it did a good job. I still had to do a final edit. I suspect this is how many AI workflows will look: humans lay the groundwork, AI does some magic, and humans do the final touch up or provide further direction.
I fully expect to be surprised at the end of the year at how AI has changed design workflows, but to me that’s pretty exciting. Especially because it means its likely you’ll probably be able to do a lot more with a lot less.
4. It will be harder to get a design job (unfortunately)
There were a lot of very visible layoffs towards the end of 2022, especially in the tech sector. While not the most impacted discipline, designers were still hit hard. The economy is not looking good, and when things don’t look good companies contract. Budgets tighten and teams get by with less headcount.
Unfortunately for those looking for a design job in 2023, this means it will be a lot harder than during the boom times. My best high-level advice for those looking for a design job:
Get clear on where you’d like to work and why
Work your network and get connected with people that work there
Form a clear idea of what it means to be a good candidate for that company
Craft your application materials (resume, cover email, portfolio) to tell a compelling story of how you’d add value to their organization
Work on your skills through personal projects. Build in public. Share your work.
Don’t give up
There is one silver lining. When companies don’t want to invest in developing or growing their own teams, they often look to external resources to get things done. The bleak outlook on the economy might actually be a boon for freelancers and small agencies (which is how a lot of industrial designers work) as companies try to keep shipping products while maintaining flexibility on spend.
5. (Good) Design leaders will change the way they lead
Burnout is real. According to a 2022 WeTransfer report that surveyed over 6,500 creatives globally, 75% reported feeling mentally and physically exhausted. As we exit year 3 of the COVID-19 pandemic, attitudes towards work seem to have permanently shifted. People are less willing to work overtime, expect flexibility to work remotely, and, according to the Wall Street Journal, are less ambitious overall.
Designers, who have traditionally been more passion-driven and willing to go above and beyond, are not exempt from these cultural shifts. In many ways, this is a healthy adjustment, as creative jobs have always been steeped in a culture of suffering for the craft that is unproductive at best. Design leaders who have been used to relying on their teams to just "suck it up" and grind through tough spots will find their people less willing to do so, and risk pushing them away if they make this ask too often. To optimize performance and fulfillment, leaders must find out what really motivates their staff, connect with them on a common purpose, and develop a healthy respect for boundaries.
Perhaps a sign of the changing times - I saw at least two or three design studios publicly announce weeks-long closures of their offices over the winter holidays, something that may not have happened just a few years ago.