What is a Product Designer?
SVA’s Product Design Program in New York Trains Students to Be Product Designers
In a world divided into thousands of specializations, it is becoming almost impossible for industries to work together to create positive change. Our graduate program in product design offers a robust, education that creates designers who are able to collaborate across multiple specializations. Product design master courses prepare students to work on the front lines of business, social innovation, engineering, and design.
What Is the Difference Between Product and Industrial Design?
Product design is a term that has evolved over time to encompass both industrial and interactive design. While industrial design refers to physical objects, interactive design is an umbrella term for digital skills like mobile app design, digital interface and platform design, web design, and other non-physical designed experiences. Product Design at SVA offers master's courses in product design that hone students' skills in the areas of industrial and interactive design. While the term 'product design' here is all-encompassing, the applications are unique.
Consequently, our graduate courses in New York will prepare students for their fields of interest within the sphere of product design while setting them up for success with professionals in other specializations. To best prepare our students for success, we do not require postgraduates to choose between fields of industrial or digital design. Products Design at SVA offers a multidisciplinary education with the intent of helping students go further with their degrees in a world that desperately needs collaborators.
When you take design graduate courses with us, you'll meet the world's most creative designers and learn from faculty members who are cross-disciplinary, industry-diverse, and international. Here, you'll learn from the best of the best—renowned artists, designers, critics, and thought-leaders.
What Is a Product Designer?
In the simplest terms, product designers combine business goals with user needs to make consistently successful products. Product designers devise innovative solutions to optimize the user experience and elevate their brands by making products more sustainable long-term.
Product designers help brands release successful products by creating road maps and defining product goals. By carefully monitoring brands' positions in the market over a projected period, designers gauge the impact of decisions based on comprehensive domain knowledge. Designers can act as the glue between professionals in similar yet specialized adjacent fields, helping organizations and teams stay mindful of both bigger-picture and bottom-line realities—particularly over extended periods.
Product designers play a significant role in sustaining and maximizing gains as well as minimizing or even preventing the negative consequences of mass production.
What Does a Product Designer Do?
Whether they’ve earned a master’s degree in product design or became a product designer by gaining experience, product designers perform the following key tasks in various roles:
Collaborate across teams: These professionals are trained to adopt a holistic view of product design, and they often collaborate with business teams, researchers, and designers. Designers help teams work together to ensure products are user-friendly, well-designed, and aligned with a company's goals.
Consider the user: A product designer will enfold user experience (UX) principles into their creative tasks. In thinking of the user, a designer will conduct UX research such as email surveys and A/B or split testing and build journey maps, prototypes, and wireframes.
Design, design, design: A product designer wears many hats. At the forefront of their ascribed duties is, of course, design. Designers will use their knowledge of detail, typography, color, and other design elements to create a product.
Useful Skills for Product Designers
Earning a master's in product design helps students develop the technical skills needed to use production materials and methods creatively. It also sharpens creative design skills and equips students with a range of sought-after skills, such as:
Spatial and visual awareness
Problem-solving skills
Teamwork skills
Entrepreneurial and commercial skills
Communication and presentation skills
The ability to use initiative and work independently
The ability to meet deadlines and perform under pressure
General and specialist information technology (IT) skills
Employment Opportunities in Product Design
Graduate courses centered around product design help students gain the practical skill sets and broad theoretical knowledge they need to create new products. Jobs directly related to a master's degree in product design include:
Industrial Designer
Interaction Designer (digital product designer)
UX/UI Designer
Transportation Designer
Social Innovation Designer
Furniture Designer
Interior Designer
Exhibition Designer
Experience Designer
Design Researcher
Design Strategist
Learn More About Product Design at SVA
SVA’s Product Design master’s program offers graduate courses in New York that build upon students' knowledge and experience in the areas of industrial and interactive product design. If you’re exploring a traditional master’s degree in product design or a industrial design master’s degree, we’d love to discuss why our multidisciplinary degree could be the right fit.
We're looking for trained designers as well as people who should be designers. Learn how our MFA design graduate school programs can transform your future, get the answers to commonly asked questions and apply today.
To sit in on a class or guest lecture, schedule a visit, arrange to meet with the program chair, seek help to complete your portfolio or ask questions about the program, contact us!