The product designer role then and now — contemplating some student work
Usually, work you did for your master’s thesis quickly vanishes into oblivion once you have your first job and start working on real world problems (unless your are Claude E. Shannon, of course). What kept you busy for months ends up in boxes in the attic and forgotten folders on your hard drive. Christmas holidays are the time to sift through these dusty attics and deep folders. So did I and realized that looking back at a thesis after 20+ years actually offers some food for thought. To begin with, it reminded me that interaction design has been around for quite some time and predates the rise of the internet, the app economy and all kinds of XaaS as we know them today. More importantly, it sheds an interesting light on the role of the product designer and how the boundaries of that role have changed over time.
To give you some context, I graduated in industrial design at the university of Wuppertal in 1993 and the subject of my thesis was an offset printing machine to be used in office environments, i.e. by usual office people as opposed to trained printers. This might sound like a strange idea today but at that time, although digital printing for batches of a couple hundred or thousand copies was already available, for certain applications offset printing offered faster printing and higher quality at a lower cost. The basic hypothesis was that, if the complexity (and dirt) of set-up and maintenance procedures would be drastically reduced — i.e. if the user experience would be better — , small and highly automated offset printing machines could be an alternative to high-volume copy machines.
Key for improving the experience were printing plates that were easy to produce (already available at that time), pre-filled, easy to change cartridges, so that users don’t have to deal with open chemicals/paint and a simple graphical user interface to run the automated set-up and printing procedures. I started off with the physical design — the mandatory part of the thesis — but was fascinated by the idea to also prototype the UI. In the end, the thesis had two parts, the industrial design of the machine and the UI work. The model for the physical design and the UI prototype were entirely separated. The design model was primarily made of fiberboard and polystyrene and there were also the inevitable renderings with markers. The UI prototype, on the other hand, was a Hypercard stack that ran on the 9'’ display of my Mac SE. From today’s perspective, with photorealistic renderings (already available at that time, although not at a budget), 3d printing and high-fidelity prototyping tools for the GUI available for almost anyone the whole design presentation looks slightly archaic.
This was the 90s not the 50s, so most technical products had some kind of digital user interface to control the product. In the industrial design process this part of the product was usually neglected though. While physical user interface elements such as handles and knobs were designed in great detail for decades or centuries, the digital UI was typically represented as a blank control display that served as a placeholder for all kinds of interaction with the device or machine.
It was 15 years before the introduction of the iPhone that industrial designer Tönis Käo, head of the Siemens design studio at that time, realized that there’s not much left in terms of physical product design once the display takes over the entire user interface. Yet the industrial design education in the 1990s was almost exclusively focussed on physical hardware and the design of the UI was often considered a visual design job. To be fair, since most companies kept hardware and software development in separate silos, this separation reflected the reality of the job marked at that time. And although many product designers ended up doing web design work when the internet took off in the 90s, it wasn’t really considered a product design job but rather a career change.
Today, physical product design and user interface design often go hand in hand. Technological development will further blur the boundaries between the UI and “the rest of the product”, both from a technical component perspective and from a user’s point of view. So shall we finally expect the various design tasks for the physical and non-physical components of a product that constitutes its single user experience to merge back into one product designer role? If we do, it will add another dimension to the end-to-end integration in product design.
In the recent years — and primarily in the context of software products—, the term product designer increasingly refers to a type of designer that not long ago was considered to be the mythical unicorn. A single person that would be able to handle all the different aspects of product creation from user research to concept/UX, to UI/visual, to prototyping to actual front-end development. Adding hardware to this picture adds a bunch of necessary skills primarily on the prototyping and mechanical/electrical engineering end. We already see some development pointing in this direction. A new generation of makers is growing up, building integrated hardware and software hacks, based on curiosity and cheap Arduino toolkits. Now, this may or may not overstretch the role of the product designer. At least partly this will depend on the tools that will be available and how these tools will help to complete a task that previously needed a couple of years of training and practice.
Looking at the current situation, most of the sophisticated tools you can use today to build high-fidelity prototypes or even export production code in virtually no time, are focused on interaction on the screen, using graphics and text, buttons and text input. Tools for prototyping more integrated experiences that include hardware and software and that don’t require you to have an engineering degree are also available today. However, the experience of using Arduino (and the fidelity of the results) is much closer to cardboard and Hypercard/Hypertalk in 1993 than Adobe XD or InVision in the GUI domain. Yet having seen the development from Hypercard to Director to Flash to Axure to Sketch/InVision or Adobe XD, it’s easy to imagine a similar development in the integrated prototyping domain, including hardware and non-graphical UIs, e.g. gestural or voice interfaces. Let’s see if it takes another 25 years though.
