Career as a Product Designer
Product Designer or Industrial Designers develop designs for a range of practical products that are used in commercial, domestic and industrial situations. They also create prototypes of these designs with a view towards mass production. Product design is all about creating new three-dimensional products through an efficient process of idea generation, development and evaluation. Product designers have an understanding of the relationship between art, science and technology, and have the ability to exploit each of these things in different ways to create new products. Product Designer research will use the product and the various ways it might be used, sketch out ideas or create blueprints, use computer software to develop virtual models of different designs and examine materials and production costs to determine manufacturing requirements. They work with other specialists to evaluate whether their design concepts will fill the need at a reasonable cost, evaluate product safety, appearance, and function to determine if a design is practical and present designs and demonstrate prototypes to clients for approval. Industrial designers generally focus on a particular product category. For example, some design medical equipment, while others work on consumer electronics products, such as computers or smart phones. Industrial designers often work with engineers, production experts, and marketing specialists to find out if their designs are feasible and to apply their colleagues’ professional expertise to their designs. For example, industrial designers may work with marketing specialists to develop plans to market new product designs to consumers. Computers are a major tool for industrial designers. They use computer-aided design software (CAD) to sketch ideas because computers make it easy to make changes and show alternatives.