Product Designer

To understand how the role of the industrial designer might change in the future, it helps to look at how the term "product designer" has evolved over the past 20 years.

Many industrial designers still remember a time when their core craft — ideating and shaping tangible, three-dimensional objects — was called "product design." Yet, as digital ecosystems expanded over the past two decades, that title underwent a swift, quiet hijack. As apps and mobile services proliferated, the design of digital interfaces exploded. Cheaper to build and faster to scale, the digital app became the defining "product" of the modern economy. Almost overnight, "product design" became a discipline of pixels and viewports, and the work of designing physical objects became "industrial design."

For physical designers, this felt like a loss of identity. This is a point raised by Will Howe, founder of industrial design studio DEMO: "The term 'industrial design' doesn't really communicate what we do. It paints the wrong picture in people's minds." He believes it's because the words "industrial design" are a limited description of the process behind the discipline, rather than a portrayal of the breadth and depth of what is actually designed.

More than a matter of professional politics or semantics, the changing definition of "product design" mirrors a much deeper, structural evolution in the physical objects around us, prompting the question: What is a product?

Durrell Bishop believes a product is a representation of a system: A set of affordances, digital or physical, that are accepted by society as communication and delivery of the underlying mechanics of that system. He summarises that "A product is a practical translation of its system."

Under this lens, our relationship with physical objects fundamentally changed as early as the 1980s. Before microchips, what a product did, how it was used — a product's "behaviour" — was directly tied to its physical mechanics; you pulled a lever, turned a dial, or pressed a button to make the product work. But as products became computerised, their systems became internalised — and vanished into printed circuit boards. Functionality was abstracted behind electronic layers. Designers increasingly became stylists, as the behaviour of the product was handed off to electronic engineers.

Then came connectivity and the Internet of Things. Wireless networks allowed electronic objects to talk to each other and to us. Powered by accessible tools like Arduino and 3D printing, a new generation of designers set out to re-engage and explore physical behaviour.

This democratisation birthed a vibrant new design business ecosystem.

Reflecting on this period, Will recalls how a new breed of client emerged: "Interesting hardware startups began looking to collaborate with design studios that were smaller — without the huge overheads. Hardware design became more of a cottage industry because tools were accessible and cheaper but still had polish." The startup model demanded quick, iterative development without the massive capital hurdles of traditional design and manufacturing. Pioneering hardware projects, supported by channels like Kickstarter, became a typical demonstration of this flourishing economy.

This tactile resurgence, however, was brief. The expressive language of physical hardware was soon abandoned. The ubiquity of the smartphone — "there's an app for that" — meant that every smart device quickly outsourced its intelligence and interface to an app. The potential of connected physical interaction was lost to screen taps.

Now we stand at another inflection point, with the rise of artificial intelligence.

Giving everyone the power to code and build digital products, AI will ultimately remove the need for industrial designers to make technical handoffs to digital specialists. They will be able to control every aspect of a product's manifestation, from physical to digital.

Where the skills of the product designer once diverged — splitting between designing digital interfaces or designing 3D objects — AI creates an opportunity for these worlds to re-converge.

Potential lies in the blurring of these boundaries. For Bruno Schillinger, AI could reignite the tradition for designers-as-polymaths. "Designers have always forayed across disciplines. It comes naturally because of creativity. I'm excited by the idea of super multidisciplinary designers again, where you aren't constrained by saying 'I only do that kind of design.'"

For Durrell, it provides the chance to re-unify design teams. He argues that disjointed design approaches, thinking about either digital screens or physical skins (and missing everything in between), has severely limited what products could become. Forcing designers to think about the whole product means that products can be shaped by bigger, holistic visions.

This shift will inevitably reshape the role of the designer once again. Although time will tell what we'll call our future designers, it's clear that the evolving title of the "product designer" isn't just a story of changing job descriptions — it's the living history of how products are envisioned and built, as technology evolves.