I had a chat with an ex-colleague of mine last week. We haven't spoken since I left our mutual employer some years ago. Me first, then him about a year later. In his current role he runs an Industrial Design team within a large engineering consultancy. Amongst our banter he expressed his dismay at still having to deal with engineers that refuse to believe Industrial Design does anything more than make pretty boxes. Despite substantial evidence that they do so much more. At least they know what Industrial Design is, I guess.

The conversation around the dissociation of value from design is by now a well-worn path. That doesn't mean it's not real though, because it very much is. Actually, dissociation is probably the wrong word. To dissociate something implies it must first be associated. Something design struggles to lay claim to.

Whatever we call it, I continue to contemplate how we as designers might collectively get a better deal than we historically have. As an Industrial Design consultant this is a conundrum that sits closer to front of mind than most. How might Industrial Design be presented and communicated better is, you may note, a question I've been asking myself and others for some time.

Integrated Design

Ever noticed how design is always integrated into some other service or product?

If you go, as I did once, to a manufacturer of springs and asked them for a spring, they would design it for you but sell you the springs. They don't sell you the spring design. If you go to an injection moulding manufacturer and get a quote for tooling, you don't buy the tool design and the tool separately. You buy the tool, and the tool design is integrated into the cost.

The same holds true with many areas of engineering and manufacturing. Even orthopaedics. Possibly even some design disciplines like fashion design, though that's far from my area of expertise. These companies know they will sell the final output, and thus roll the cost of design into the final sale price. Clients and customers come with an idea and leave with one or more tangible items in their possession. The customer walks away with the thing they wanted, and thus attaches the value to that.

This doesn't mean design doesn't have value. Rather, the design costs are absorbed by other means - separate to the client or customer paying for them directly. The design cost is obscured by the tooling cost, the garment cost, the instrument cost. Even if in such circumstances the design is a line item, it's not separated from the tangible output. For all intents and purposes it's another "fee" on the invoice next to service delivery fee and GST. The design itself, despite being the essential mechanism to go from idea to object, is invisible or near-invisible.

Even Apple*. Who, as a company managed to bring "Industrial Design" into the mainstream. Or at least a subset of the mainstream that has an interest in tech. All their products have, and have for decades, featured design as a big part of their value proposition. Customers nod knowingly, and buy Apple products because of their design (and nothing to do with their anti-competitive behaviour). Yet despite Apple's design-forward approach, customers don't pay for the design. They pay for the product that has the design integrated.

I wonder, if a fraction of the design cost was added as a separate line item to each customers purchase, would they happily pay it? Would they?

To most, in fact to everybody, design isn't a tangible thing. Even if design is the very thing that makes tangible the thing they value.

The Industrial Design Add-On

For Industrial Design in particular I see this even in consulting. Most notably in electronics hardware design where setup, infrastructure, and overhead costs are high, and it's easier to justify the design expense. As they say; hardware is hard. Electronics is much more 'black box' too, like regulatory, where people don't understand how it works under the bonnet and are thus more willing to pay for someone who does.

By contrast, Industrial Design is easily [mis]understood and fairly cheap to spin up. Aside from a decent PC, a 3D printer, and a few seats of software, there's relatively little infrastructure required. And sadly, for all the reasons I'm circumscribing here, Industrial Designers are also pretty cheap and plentiful in the junior to mid-level range. If you're not too fussy.

It is far easier and cheaper to add Industrial Design to your electrical engineering team, than it is to add electrical engineering to your Industrial Design team. Industrial Design becomes the add-on, not the title feature.

A Perpetuating Attitude

It's no wonder then that Industrial Design can't shake the "designs pretty boxes" stereotype. Industrial Design, and design more broadly, continues to be obscured and subsidised by the very engineering and manufacturing we enable.

One fellow Industrial Designer I asked the value question to, said that the only way to overcome the dominating perception of design was to form a united front in changing the attitude. We, as a group, must refuse to do design for exposure, refuse to have design 'bundled in' with other services or products, and refuse to accept that no one knows what design is and what design does. Only when clients and customers have no other option but to accept the shift in paradigm can the paradigm be shifted.

While I agree there's some truth to that, I'm also sceptical Industrial Designers could ever make a united front. ID is just far too diverse. It's hard to say Industrial Design demands serious consideration when designing a device to treat Alzheimer's disease, while yet other Industrial Designers are designing stools as giant buttons.

People <3 Products

One of my views, which has evolved over the last few years that I've been consulting, is how design should be applied to the real world. While the platonic view of Industrial Design has always been design-as-a-service, I now encourage young designers to begin investing their design skills into their own designs, not just chasing the dream consultancy job.

Investing into your own designs, your own obsessions, is a fantastic way to learn so much more about the product lifecycle than one would by just creating sketches and renders for a portfolio. More than that, showing any potential employer that you can not only create design, but bring it into being will put you ahead of most candidates.

You never know, one project might just take off. Especially in niche markets where there are enthusiasts willing to try, and pay for, your product. If it does take off, the paradigm shifts. You are no longer trying to ask people to pay for a service they may not understand, but asking people to pay for a product that they can touch and feel and show off and have a connection with. People love paying for products.

People love paying for the embodiments of design, even if they don't understand why they should pay for the design. There are plenty of examples of Industrial Designers selling their design skills disguised as products for purchase.

The Trojan Horse

I realise this doesn't help bring Industrial Design out of obscurity. This is kind of my point. Perhaps we (I?) should accept that Industrial Design as a profession will always be obscure, poorly understood, and questionably valued.

Perhaps the way to bring design to front of mind, and help people understand what Industrial Design is, is with a trojan horse. The way Apple did. The way Braun did before them. By selling the product with design hiding inside.

Perhaps, there's even a way to productise design itself. Not by changing fee structures or payment terminology, though that could be part of it. Rather, by selling the outputs of each stage of the design process as if they were products. Concepts cost this much, prototypes cost that much, etc. By transmogrifying design into those tangible things that can be understood and value attached to them, we can sneak the cost of design in.

Inside the pretty box.

*Is it just me, or does Apple get a lot less airtime in the tech news than it used to? I feel I almost never hear about Apple any more unless it's an antitrust case. Is Apple boring now?