From Design Engineer to Experience Architect
The journey to working in Experience Design can be different for everyone. The job can entail a mix of different fields such as design, psychology and computing. Some of you more eagle-eyed readers will have noticed I haven’t included engineering in that list, and that’s what I will be focussing on throughout this piece: the role of engineering (or more specifically Design Engineering) in Experience Design and what it takes to shift from one to the other.
So what is Design Engineering?
Divisions of engineering such as Mechanical Engineering are well defined, understood by virtue of having been around for so long. Design Engineering remains very new to the industry, though the job title crops up everywhere. For me, Design Engineering sits closely between Mechanical Engineering and Product Design, bringing engineers closer to the principles of user centred design.
Our Head of Department at the Dyson School of Design Engineering at Imperial College would have labelled the speciality as “the fusion of design thinking, engineering thinking and practice, within a culture of innovation and enterprise”. Whether that makes it more or less clear, the point is: Design Engineering work is about focusing on understanding our users. So, on top of learning the technical engineering concepts, I also studied user research techniques in depth — how to develop personas, build customers journey maps and apply these to physical and digital products; making sure the product development was truly user-centric.
How is it similar?
Here at ELSE, we do Experience Design, or Customer Experience Design, but I’ll stick to the more commonly used term of Experience Design. We’re user-focused, conduct a range of research to discover user needs, develop personas to understand who we’re designing for, create customers journey maps along with experience blueprints and frameworks. The similarities with what I studied during my Design Engineering course are striking. The work ELSE does is predominantly digital, but the skills I developed are transferable none-the-less. There is little difference in understanding a user of a digital product to a physical one.
The similarities don’t end there. To put this one into context, at ELSE we worked with a client to help turn an idea into reality. The client operates within the logistics industry, a sector that is experiencing lots of disruption so perfect for ELSE. Something I didn’t quite realise at the beginning is the sheer complexity of the technology they were using, but also the complexity of the industry itself. It has the potential to be really daunting and for you to get lost in the complexity of it all, but for me that’s where the engineering side of things came into play.
Having studied an engineering subject, I was able to get to grips with understanding the technology that would power what we were designing. Going in made me feel comfortable knowing that I’d learnt complex theories around thermo and fluid dynamics, logistics couldn’t possibly be more complex than the maths that sat behind those theories. Feeling confident in my abilities helped me to see clearly, make sound decisions and provide the very best for my client. To do this work, you need to be comfortable with solving problems, something that is like second nature to both engineers and experience designers, and that’s exactly what we were doing for the client. We helped to solve logistics-based problems, harnessing their technology and making it useful and insightful for their users.
How is it different?
But before I give the impression it’s all sunshine and rainbows making the shift, there are as you’d expect some challenges. Moving into a completely digital space means that while I’m using a lot of the principles I developed through Design Engineering, I’m not necessarily directly using some of the skills I’ve gained. For example, while studying I worked a lot on physical products, working with my hands and getting deep into the technicalities of how things worked. The essence of this is different when you’re working in a digital only environment. This leaves me with a small, but not un-noticeable, longing for the physical elements. The geek inside of me that loves learning and understanding the technical parts doesn’t always feel like he’s being used to his full potential.
Now this isn’t necessarily a bad thing — I frequently have conversations between developers on how to deliver different designs. There’s always opportunities to learn and understand the technical aspects, but I’ve had to accept that I might not be the one who gets to implement that. This is what I find most challenging — accepting that I’m stepping into a specialist role away from a role that is more generalist. Design Engineering provides you with an impressive amount of breadth, but the depth is then up to you, and it’s not as easy to have the depth in each area of your breadth.
My takeaways…
The point I’m making on my ramble is this: making the shift from Design Engineering to Experience Design makes more sense than people might originally think. On the outside, they look like very different roles, but the skills required for each are extremely transferable. The shift in the other direction, however, would be very difficult to achieve given the expected knowledge from an engineering perspective. Which means those of us who studied Design Engineering have something unique to offer in the realm of Experience Design.
