Product Design/ Development. A dying field?

Many individuals hold the belief that Product Design/ Development is a strong field that is growing extremely quickly each and every year. Of course on the other end are skeptics who believe that Product Design/ Decelopment and any Design career or major is general is dead.

Robert Fabricant agrees with the claim that Design is quickly dying and disappearing because in his eyes there is really no need for it. Robert Fabricant is the Co-Founder and Principal of Dalbergs Deisgn Impact Group. Also, he is co-authoring a book on User Experience with Cliff Kuang, Articles Editor at Wired Magazine. Fabricant talks about when he first entered the design field in the 1990s and how there was a great amount of digital change. Right and left design firms were opening up and large companies were coming up with extremely creative ideas that no one had ever seen before.

This great wave of digital change soon ended as companies instead focused more on competing with one another and making their similar products bigger and better than their competitors in small ways instead of having completely different ideas. As this occurred, the Design industry still flourished because almost all of the products that had been designed out of creative ideas needed to be developed into more usable products. Not long after, all of the bugs and issues with the technology had seemed to be taken care of therefore Product Designers/ Developers found themselves at a standstill.

Fabricant claims that this standstill is still occurring and even getting worse and worse. Not many new technologies and products are being created therefore Designers are out of a job. Unfortunately, Designers are also out of a job due to fabrication shops that large companies have used in order to adapt to the “new economy” that has developed over the years. Fabrication shops are basically places where companies are able to essentially steal ideas from competitors and create exact replicas of products in order to keep up with the market. This requires only one Design team to create he product initially, and then from there the product is just colored and copied so the Designers who would usually have to work for these companies are out of a job.

I understand many of Fabricants ideas, but I do not believe that Product Design/ Development is dead at all. I believe that almost every product in the world today could be improved in some way. Also, there are many problems with our products today, therefore I believe that Designers are a necessary part of our society and economy.

Although I disagree with Fabricants when it comes to Design being a dying field, I do agree with him in the fact that fabrication shops are really affecting the jobs of Product Design/ Developers. It’s extremely underhanded that companies are stealing each other’s ideas and cheating the system. This is stunting the growth of technology and is overall wrong. Fabricant’s beliefs really made me think about Product Design/ Development and really makes me aware of how the field is evolving.