What’s the difference between physical and digital design?
My partner is a Product Designer. A physical Product Designer, that is — sometimes called an Industrial designer. My background is in UX Design, but ‘Product Designer’ has been a rising job title in the digital industry lately too. This has led to an interesting situation whereby the lines of the disciplines are becoming blurred, and Industrial/Product designers are being inundated with LinkedIn positions that are actually digital — I’ve seen this frustration firsthand through my partner. One thing I’ve always admired about him is the passion that he holds for his craft; no matter what attractive digital offers come into his LinkedIn mail, he would never make the change, because he truly loves what he does and has known he wanted to be an Industrial Designer since school. But, it did get me thinking about the similarities and differences between the 2 roles. Could a Product (Industrial) designer easily transfer into a digital role? What about vice versa?
A couple of weeks ago I spoke to a Product Designer who said a fantasy of his was recently fulfilled when he went home with his date to find a hair drier he’d designed in her bedroom. All very cool, and definitely the stuff dreams are made of, an irresistible flex, but…there’s a team of digital designers who’ve designed the app they met on. Also quite the flex, if you ask me, but of course I have to rep it for the digital designers. It’s the ultimate design war, so let’s get into it.
A bitta history
Physical design is of course an older industry than digital, where UX design and Product design roles have really only come to be in the last 20 years.
“The first attributed use of the term “industrial design” in 1919 is credited to Joseph Claude Sinel, a self-proclaimed “industrial designer.” However, many argue that the discipline began at least a decade before. Christopher Dresser is generally considered the first independent industrial designer. Then there is the Practical Draughtsman’s Book of Industrial Design, printed in 1853. Together, these data points anchor the beginning of design as a profession between 1850 and 1900.”
For UX, the term was first coined by psychologist and designer Don Norman in the 1990s. The term ‘Product design’ in digital seems to have really taken off in the last 5 years. What’s the difference between a UX Designer and a Product Designer? There’s contention around this, but it’s most commonly that a ‘Product Designer’ is a ‘full stack’ designer — covering UX and UI and research (this could be another article in itself). So, prior to the creation of UX and Product Design as a job role, what the hell happened?! Well, you had job titles like ‘Web designer’, whereby solutions were development based and a web designer simply designed the front end. This is more graphic design like, and there was a total lack of research input.
Digital design is actually heavily influenced by the industrial design process, so we should be giving our kudos to our product designer counterparts! Credit where credit is due.
Process
Both Industrial Design and Digital Design are disciplines focused on problem solving. In order to create successful designs, we need to first understand the problem and the way humans interact with products.
For Industrial design, human factors is essential for this. It can be defined as;
Concerned with the application of what we know about people, their abilities, characteristics, and limitations to the design of equipment they use, environments in which they function, and jobs they perform.
As you can see, human factors is concerned with the physical and the way people interact with products in space. We can draw a parallel between the use of human factors for Industrial Design, and user research in Digital Design. Industrial Designers will use a handbook of anthropometrics to cross check their designs. Where this ensures physical products are usable, user research and methods such as usability testing do the same for digital products — but this is rooted in the cognitive and understanding the mental journey. A lot of user researchers and designers come from a psychology background. However, thats not to say that physicality is exempt from research in UX design. We also need to look at the way people actually interact with digital products physically; for example, are the buttons large enough for peoples fingers? Which parts of the screen are harder to reach? Let’s make sure we don’t place key actions there. Maybe the digital product is a shopping self checkout — this opens up different physical considerations. (Here, it’s worth mentioning Service Design, a discipline which spans both the physical and the digital to understand full journeys and experiences). Accessibility guidelines are also a way to cross check our digital designs with physical limitations, such as blindness and the use of screen readers.
It’s clear that both physical and digital follow a pattern of divergence and convergence, with research and iterations being a key part of the process. You can apply the ‘double diamond’ process to both physical and digital. We can draw parallels between working with engineers and with developers, with manufacturing being like development.
However, what is different is the timelines from ideation to release. The physical product design process typically takes 12–18 months+ for a product to be released. What this means, is that there’s more pressure to ‘get it right’ before release, and many iterations and tests will take place before launch. If you release a faulty product, it can totally damage a companies reputation and the financial costs are huge. However, in digital, we have the concept of an ‘MVP’ (Minimum valuable product), due to the fact that we can iterate on built features relatively quickly. Idea conception to release can be as little as a 1 month turnaround. Whilst there’s still research, iterations and testing, there’s also an understanding that we can continue to add value once released. If you mess up slightly with a feature release and get the padding wrong on your margins, chances are the developers will be able to raise a ticket for the next sprint. But, if you release a product with the wrong measurements….well, you may have just ruined your employers reputation forever. No pressure, though!
Skillsets and backgrounds
When I look at myself and my partner, it confuses me that we’re both in the same field; we have completely different skillsets. Whilst I’ve always been more research, analysis and strategy inclined, my partner is much more practical, detailed, mechanical and ‘designery’ if you will. He’ll happily spend an afternoon analysing and dissecting a spray bottle nozzle. I know, seems kinda weird right? Then again, i’m sure he gets tired of me assessing how logical the layout in Lidl is. So, it got me wondering, do the same type of people typically go into physical and digital design?
Due to the fact Industrial Design is a much older industry, it’s more likely that people will know this is what they want to do earlier on in their lives, and there are more courses that lend themselves to the vocation, with many doing DT in school and getting a degree in Industrial or Product Design, possibly even with an engineering background. The path into UX Design is much more vague however. There are few degrees in the topic (but they do exist, like Human Centred Interaction), and it’s less likely you’ll hear about it as a career option in school — at least it was in my day, but maybe i’m out of touch. Some people come from a graphic design background and go through training, and some people now go through a ‘bootcamp’ and come from a totally different career. These bootcamps are on the rise. This means digital product designers are likely to come from more diverse educational and vocational backgrounds.
If I could sum up the skills of a UX Designer (caveat — I say UX here because it is hard to do this for a full stack/product designer as I believe research, UX and UI all require different skillsets and I think it’s near impossible to find someone who excels in all) from my own experience in the industry, I would say; strong communicator and collaborator, problem solving skills, curious and empathetic, ability to give and receive feedback, adaptable and able to distill complex information into simple solutions. After I wrote this, I googled skills required for an Industrial designer, and the first article I found actually listed all of these. Who woulda thought! It could also be suggested that the skill of empathy and abstract thinking are required more for digital designers, due to the fact it is more ‘invisible’. We’re usually dealing with the intangible, creating digital solutions to support real world experiences. It’s heavily focused on mental thought processes, where you need to translate ‘real world’ information into digital taxonomies, hierarchies, flows, journeys and even systems. Physical product designers are designing for actual physical constraints. In addition to this, I think UX designers might need to be more ambiguous and flexible, dealing with fast paced environments and different types of projects. The skill of communication and collaboration might hold more importance also, due to the number of different stakeholders we deal with and bring into the design process.
Attention to detail and patience may be more relevant for Industrial Design, where they spend longer periods of time focused on one specific solution and need to get it right. You might find that Industrial designers are more ‘design’ focused through and through, possessing a more practical and rigorous approach. Industrial designers are required to have a thorough understanding of research methods, material science, human factors, some engineering and also mathematical skills, as well as 3D modelling software (and believe me, as a UX Designer I can vouch that it looks very complex to use). From my observations, our digital design tools are a lot simpler to use than Industrial design tools (it would be a little ironic if they weren’t easy to use).
So would you swap? Could you?
My partner argues that most Industrial Designers could relatively easily transition into a digital (UX) design role, but that it wouldn’t be easy the other way round. It’s a controversial opinion, but one I actually agree with. The reasons for this being that the learning curve to transition into Industrial Design would be a lot steeper due to the level of domain specific knowledge and skills required, as well as the complex tools. This is hard skill focused. It’s exemplified by the fact that you need a full degree in Industrial design to get into the industry, and before that, to have studied DT at school (usually). That’s not to say that a UX Designer couldn’t transfer relatively easily into something like concept design, where the skillset would lend itself to this but there’s less domain specific knowledge and skill required.
Having the right soft skills and interests in the first place I believe is fundamental to being a good UX Designer. Industrial designers I think would be able to learn our theory relatively quickly given their existing understanding, the domain would take some time but not as long as for Industrial Design, and our tools I think would be quite easy for them to pick up. However, they might struggle with the abstract and often ambiguous nature of UX, and potentially with the more people focused and fast paced environment. From my own observations, I would suggest that the hard skills hold more importance to Industrial Design, and soft skills more for UX. Now, of course, I don’t know it all, and it’s impossible for me to get a thorough understanding of both disciplines. This has been written from my own experiences and talking with my partner and other industrial and UX designers. I’m open and keen to hear other perspectives, so please, let me know, what do you think? Comment below
If there’s any takeaway I’ve had from writing this, it’s a new level of respect for our pals over in Industrial Design. After all, we have drawn our process from them, and stolen their job title of Product Designer. To the designers reading this — I hope you’ve learnt something new about your physical or digital design counterparts! If there’s any Industrial Designers reading this — we’re sorry, please forgive us.
