What is a “Product Designer,” Now?
This article was written by Allan Chochinov, department chair, with enormous thanks to faculty Krissi Xenakis and Megan Ford, Mehera O’Brien, and the numerous conversations with creative professional colleagues who were supportive, candid, and optimistic.
While slices of design practice and expertise are getting thinner than ever, the one term that seems to be increasing in usage is the term “product designer.” This article breaks down the three main flavors of a product designer, what they’re intended to accomplish, and why having expertise in these areas will set you up for the most exciting and impactful career possible. Here are the three we’ll be discussing below:
The “Physical” Product Designer
The “Digital” Products Designer
The “Project” Product Designer
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HOW USER JOURNEYS & TOUCHPOINTS AFFECT DESIGN
First, some framing language: When we think about the designed world, it is useful to think in terms of all the products and experiences that we encounter in any activity throughout our day. Designers call these activities “user journeys” and the products and experiences that we encounter “touchpoints.”
Let’s take “going to the doctor” as an activity example and break down a few touchpoints in a person’s user journey.
The first touchpoint happens before you get to the doctor. In the United States, to receive care you must first find out if your insurance plan will cover your visit. So, you either need to interact with an insurance representative, your employer’s HR person, or an insurance website. You may even end up on hold with a chatbot that has been programmed to listen to your request and deliver an automated response. Keep in mind that both the insurance website and the chatbot AI algorithms are “designed” by designers.
Once you arrive at the doctor’s office, you are faced with the task of filling out paperwork at a check-in desk (probably without an inviting surface to write on) or on an iPad (with way too many screens), all of which are designed. When you finally get into the room, you are invited to climb onto the examination table (invariably designed at the wrong height for your body) and suffer through the awful crinkling as you lay down, half-dressed, on a “sterile” paper sheet. All the tools that the health care professionals might use during your visit—from blood pressure cuffs to syringes and EKG machines are products of design.
When we think about the designed world, it is useful to think in terms of all the products and experiences that we encounter in any activity throughout our day. Designers call these activities “user journeys” and the products and experiences that we encounter “touchpoints.”
On your way home, perhaps you need to pick up a prescription at the pharmacy (and we’ve all got nightmare stories about that designed experience!) Then, days later, you receive a customer-service text from the doctor’s office asking you to “rate your experience” of the visit. (Surveys are notoriously poorly designed. It’s not just you!)
So, when considering the design of healthcare, it is a collection of touchpoints that ultimately define the experience of “going to the doctor.” Our health system is a result of whether or not these touchpoints are designed with you, the human, in mind.
So who are these designers who craft all of these touchpoints along the user journey? Let’s get into it.
3 KINDS OF PRODUCT DESIGNERS
Practically speaking, there are 3 kinds of product designers out there, and we’ll define them below. Still, remember that these are general overviews of specific practices when nuance and overlap occur in design all the time.
1. The“Physical” Product Designer (or “Industrial Designer”)
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Physical product design is the design of “physical artifacts in physical spaces.” A physical product designer designs objects like toothbrushes, furniture, cars or even surgical instruments—anything that can be manufactured and made tangible.
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Physical product designers typically call themselves “industrial designers.” But since it’s hard for people to understand what that term means (“You mean you design industries?”), people in this profession took to calling themselves “product designers.” Until around 2005, if you introduced yourself at a party as a “product designer,” you could describe the kinds of things that you had designed—all belonging to the physical world—and carry on the conversation from there. Often you could be met with a, “So you’re a kind of inventor? Who gets paid for it? Wow!”
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The skills of a physical product designer used to be quite definite. They included “form & function”—how things looked and how they worked—as well as materials, manufacturing, and ergonomics. These days, they also include design research, product strategy, digital rendering, CAD, design for accessibility, sustainability, life-cycle assessment, and more. Designers must also consider the supply chain, labor practices, take-back systems, safety and regulatory practices, and often product packaging and branding.
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People love things. It is a fundamental human gratification to hold something in your hand, to want to share, to give a gift, to repair, to nurture, and to care. At a fundamental level, physical product design has the potential to viscerally alter the world and give meaning to our daily lives.
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As you can imagine, balancing the capitalist imperative of supplying the world with a never-ending stream of fresh, new, and novel products collides head-on with working toward a more sustainable world and more equitable distribution and access. This is a total nightmare and something that keeps most (conscientious) industrial designers up at night. And should.
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There are countless routes for an industrial designer. You may end up specializing in medical devices, virtual reality headgear, sneaker design, or any myriad of product categories in the design chain that carry an idea from invention through production and sales. Earnings for industrial designers fluctuate around the world, and the future of this profession—at least right now—seems quite bright. New digital prototyping and manufacturing techniques such as 3D-printing, digital fabrication, and algorithmic design, are continuously redefining how products are created. At the same time, you’ll need more than a traditional skill set, beyond “form & function & materiality” to be in the meetings where consequential decisions get made. (Business, marketing, behavioral psychology, public policy, etc.)
Then, of course, there is mass production. Megan Mills Ford, Head of Programs at NYC’s argodesign, shared that often, consideration of scale is the mark of a mature product designer: “So the product exists; how do we build it or refine it or scale it? A lot of what happens at our agency is figuring out how our clients can scale their design experiences. Product designers need to consider feasibility.”
Of note: Artificial Intelligence is going to radically change the toolkits with which objects get designed, produced, and distributed, so that’s either very exciting or, well, very scary.
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Here's the heartbreaker for industrial designers: After the year 2000, with the perfect storm of the internet, the iPhone, and the digitization of absolutely everything, the profession of “interaction design” was born. Everyone wanted a website app or a digital service/platform designed. However, instead of calling themselves “interaction designers” they adopted “digital product designers” because the term “product” is very general but very useful. Everything is a “product of design.” Confusing? Yup.
Everything is a “product of design.”
Then, these digital product designers shortened their moniker into, you guessed it, “product designer.” Physical product designers still gripe about this, because at a party now, if you told someone you were a “product designer,” they would 100 percent assume that you worked in interaction design. Their reply might be “Oh, like Microsoft or Google?” and you would get a little steamed up that your term got co-opted.
2. The “Digital” Product Designer (or “Interaction Designer”)
This kind of product designer should also be relatively straightforward, but because sub-specialties of interaction design have exploded over the past decade, the term “interaction designer” is now a subspecialty of, well, interaction design.
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Digital product designers design “artifacts in digital space”—which is everything from apps on your phone to the software you use to purchase plane tickets, do your taxes, trade stocks, or Zoom your health care provider. A nice way to think about it is that interaction design is anything that is made from information obtained by interacting with others.
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Today, digital product designers work in a variety of sub-specialties. Digital product design used to be as simple as UX/UI (User Experience/User Interface) design, front-end computer programming like HTML or JavaScript, user journey mapping, or user testing. Now, digital product design can encompass some very thin focus areas of practice—information architecture, visual design, service design, accessibility design, game design, virtual reality, voice interface, chatbots, content strategy, data visualization and machine learning...it seems endless, and the field seems to expand almost monthly.
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Digital Product Designers on software development teams today are expected to be able to facilitate a wide variety of tasks—including design research, motion design, service design, visual execution, content strategy and storytelling, prototyping and experimentation. They don’t have to be experts, but maintaining a comprehensive skill set goes a long way.
Digital product designers need to have not just the “how”, but also the “why. ”According to Krissi Xenakis, Product Design Leader and Educator, “there is a more-or-less agreed-upon set of ‘digital product design skills and methodologies.’ In the end, Product Designers need to always be finding ways to ‘show the value of what they make.’” (This is great advice for all designers!)
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Where do we start?! There’s a reason there are over 2.6 million apps on the app store and why people love to browse and purchase products online. Users have adopted reading on devices where you can enlarge the type without stigma, find love through matching algorithms, and find jobs or recipes across the globe in real time. All of these things are made possible through digital design, and they’re all pretty miraculous.
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As seemingly everything moves from physical experiences to digital ones, many people complain that they are “spending their whole lives on screens” and that they feel more isolated and alienated from the “real world.” Throw in the mental health costs of social media, the economic, labor, and civic “disruption” of services like Airbnb, Uber, Amazon, and Facebook, and the polarization and radicalization that takes place through digital “filter bubbles,” and you’ve got some real concerns about the societal impact of putting so much of our lives in the digital world. And speaking of the world, the economic, energy, and carbon impacts of cloud computing and data centers are extreme.
“To quell this thermodynamic threat, data centers overwhelmingly rely on air conditioning… In North America, most data centers draw power from “dirty” electricity grids…to cool, the Cloud burns carbon, what Jeffrey Moro calls an “elemental irony.” In most data centers today, cooling accounts for greater than 40 percent of electricity usage.—Steven Gonzalez Monserrate, MIT Press
Add AI into the mix—predicted to transform virtually ALL digital systems and services—and you can quickly see runaway consequences in every direction. And, we haven’t even talked about bias, equity, digital divides, and the unprecedented concentration of power and wealth in a literal handful of monopolistic mega-platforms.
Oh, and the big one—the unrelenting digital tracking of every click, every face recognition, every purchase, every GPS physical movement…the entire surveillance capitalism industry used to extract value and concentrate wealth and control. (Kinda makes our worries about industrial designers not sleeping at night because of all the plastic they put into the world seem quaint.)
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While there are some hiccups in the 2023 job market, I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t consider the future to be bright. It is probably true that AI will create more jobs than it will destroy. At the same time, the breadth of what new technology such as machine learning can accomplish should give pause to designers who aren’t actively expanding their skillset. Salaries are high for digital product designers, and “the digitization of everything” is, and will continue to be, unstoppable. Career forecast? Pretty sunny.
The Overlap Between Physical and Digital Product Design
You may be thinking: “Well, what about products that are both physical and digital? Who designs those?” And this is a terrific question with some very exciting answers. Nobody really liked the term “Phygital” (physical + digital) when it was floated, so people typically call these hybrid products “smart objects” or IoT (Internet of Things). Nevertheless, more and more products will continue to have digital systems built into them. While the infiltration of digital systems into physical objects can often go unnoticed, it is nevertheless staggering. (For example, the modern car contains between 1500 and 3000 chips alone.) Smart objects have become a household name, and there are digital doorbells with cameras built into them, fridges with screens, and drones delivering your groceries with sophisticated on-board and remote guidance systems. This is a world that will require designers to be adept at both physical and digital design.
3. The “Project” Product Designer (or “Integrative Designer”)
A note of caution is that this flavor of “product designer” is not universal, not agreed upon, and does not always have the same job description, or title in the same industries. Still, let’s take a look.
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The modern product designer can be thought of as designing “artifacts in design organization spaces” versus artifacts in physical or digital space. Since the business value of design has now been well established, we’ve got loads of design happening all over the place. But with all of this design, we have too many teams who speak too many specialized languages—and who practice too many specialized methodologies. Many, literally, cannot talk to each other. To weave all of this design activity together, there’s now a consequent need for the parts to be coordinated in deliberate, strategic, and ultimately, wise ways.
Some people call this kind of meta-practice Design Operations. There is a kind of designer that has (and needs) talents around stringing it all together and translating across multiple individuals and teams, BUT, who has first-hand knowledge and facility around several of the different functions of different designers and stakeholders. In other words, design consultancies, in-house design departments, and other assemblages of design talent need practitioners who understand all the elements that go into a design project…and can actually do several of them.
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There is no agreement here…yet. Sometimes these people are called “Product Designers,” “Project Designers,” “Product Owners,” “Project Managers,” or “Program Managers”…and there will likely be new hybrids in the future.
We’ve got loads of design happening all over the place, but with too many teams who speak too many specialized languages—and who practice too many specialized methodologies. Many, literally, cannot talk to each other.
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In Project Product Design, an appreciation and understanding of user research, design thinking, innovation practices, prototyping, working in teams, marketing, branding, business goals, and client relations are all required. People in these roles need to be adept at people management and have an analytical mind for whatever business context the company is working in.
In the words of Mehera O’Brien, Head of Creative at New York’s argodesign, it requires people with “a strong sense of ‘process.’ People who can operationalize the team—with personalities—to efficiently deliver a product.” These roles are more generalist than specialist, and so there is a mandate to continue to broaden skill sets.
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In an increasingly specialized world, there is clearly an imperative for “translators” who can speak multiple languages across multiple stakeholders and work effectively toward a design goal.
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The challenges are balancing the business goals of the design agency with time constraints, costs, and quality, along with keeping teams happy and productive (“attract and retain” from an HR perspective). They also need to weigh the ROI against the societal and environmental impacts of what their design engines push out into the world.
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Unclear. There are some predictions that AI will rewrite the rules of some of these roles. As MBAs continue to increase their interest in design and designers continue to increase their interest in finance, we will need people at the intersections in a very, very serious way. Salaries are also not standard. (Again, no agreement on what these people are called or what they should be making.)
WHY YOU’D WANT TO LEARN ALL 3 KINDS OF “PRODUCT DESIGNER”
Choosing design as a profession can lead you to work in virtually any field in the world, including designing in public policy, service design, sustainability, design strategy and research, prompt engineering, or futuring. At the same time, a career in design is a long and multifarious one. For example, U.S. workers have an average tenure of about 4.1 years with a single employer, but most design professionals change jobs every 2 or 3 years. If we pencil out a 35-year design career, you’re looking at many, many jobs.
So, you have a choice to make—whether to choose a generalist or a specialist education. Since we are now in a world where most people will change jobs often, and up to 85% of jobs that will exist in 2030 haven't been invented yet, building skills, fluencies, and confidence in many fields of design will be incredibly advantageous.
Learn More About Our Product Design Master's Program
Are you interested in pursuing a master's program in product design? Going to grad school can elevate your career by combining it with your passion for innovation. The Product Design at SVA program offers a multidisciplinary education with a focus in product design that will expose you to multiple fields of design. In an ever-changing world, we equip our students to remain flexible in the workforce so they can successfully engage in all avenues of design.
If you have questions about our grad design program, contact us for more information or begin the application process today!
The MFA in Products of Design is an immersive two-year graduate program that creates exceptional practitioners for leadership in the shifting terrain of design. We educate heads, hearts, and hands to reinvent systems and catalyze positive change. Graduates emerge with methods, confidence, experience, and strong professional networks. They gain the skills necessary to excel in senior positions at top design firms and progressive organizations, create ingenious enterprises of their own, and become lifelong advocates for the power of design.
Title image by Pike Picture via The Noun Project