Are you a product designer (or industrial designer or design-related ME)?

[enwar3]

So... I'm in college and it's almost that time where I have to pick a major. I always knew I'd work in design, but I used to think it'd be something human biology-related (BME maybe) but as I think more about my hobbies and my obsessions, I come to the conclusion that I would probably get bored doing one thing for years.

I've talked with PD-majors and guys out in the industry, and PD sounds pretty cool. I know there's a huge difference between working in-house and for a design firm, and I feel like the more I get to work on the better. I'd like to get a wide, shallow range of experience rather than comprehensive knowledge in one single area. I love exploring and building new concepts, and I think PD might, just might, fit me well.

So current product designers (or those with similar design-oriented occupations)-- do you like your job? Why did you choose it? Where should I start if I wanted to explore the field?

 

[Injury]

Call a few places and ask if you can job shadow for a day or two?

 

[waffleironhead]

Sounds like you may be interested in a Human Factors degree. Definitly a big component of product design.

 

[radioouman]

My official title at my job is "Design Engineer", but I do about 75% project management and 25% design work.

My education back is a BS in Mechanical Engineering Technology, and then a masters degree in general Engineering with Design emphasis. Basically this means that my masters degree was an extension of mechnical engineering with courses such as Finite Element Analysis, Design of Experiments, some project management courses, and a manufacturing course thrown in for good measure. (Also, I took some additional math and communications courses.)

One of the most oppressive forces that you'll feel to your design creativity is to make a product that is as inexpensive as possible. Most of what you'll be doing is minor redesigns to products that have existing problems, and your knowledge of the manufacturing process will will be essential to fixing the problem and keeping the costs to change the tooling low.

If you have a passion for design, you'll want to go for an Industrial Design degree rather than an engineering degree. Then you will want to try to find a job designing something that needs to be asthetically pleasing. (Products that people touch or look at.) There are tons of positions for engineers where they design only functional parts. The problem (for me anyway) is that these functional parts never have to look good and should be designed to be as cheap as possible which removes a lot of the creativity that motivates you at your job. The best way to stay away from this kind of design is to avoid an engineering degree.

As someone said, a human factors degree isn't out of the question, but from my experience those people tend to do more analysis and if they design something, they are designing experiments to conduct on people. You may end up designing a new cockpit to an airplane, but for your next project you may be designing an experiment to understand sleep deprevation for firemen who work 12 hours shifts.

Human factors -- Design the layout for best ergonomics
Industrial designer -- Turn that layout into something that looks attractive
Mechanical engineer (designer) -- Intergrate the design elements into something functional

 

[enwar3]

Wow thanks for the help so far..

I totally had Industrial Design in my mind as Product Design. I also thought Product Design had more of a human interface thing than Industrial design too...

My prof told me that there were two different types of engineer/designers--designers who work with the large concepts and designers who work with the details and implementing the concepts. I'd definitely love to do the former.

And if I one day wanted to branch out into stuff like interior decoration or furniture design (basically some other kind of design), what type of major should I be thinking of now?

 

[xanis]

If you want to branch out eventually I would say that industrial design is the best major.

 

[EGGO]

Product Design right? Because at first I thought you meant Package Design. Two different things.