Career opportunities in product design

One of the professions that infuses a good deal of technical skills combined with artistic skills that are used to create, innovate or evolve products that have an effective and efficient function, appealing aesthetics, apt ergonomics and overall, invoking a pleasant experience in using it, is product design. We are surrounded by a variety of products that are of some utility or the other to us. Products that help us sit, relax, calculate, move, transport, compute, communicate, entertain, educate, protect, exercise, read, write, fly, etc and the list can be endless.

When one takes up a career in product design, one is expected to understand and create products or systems with a focused emphasis on it's user centricity, processes, sustainability, responsibility towards society and environment. It would integrate subjects such as human factors, product aesthetics, form studies, workshop skills, CAD, user research, design management, design thinking, materials such as plastics, metals, wood, ceramics, etc, manufacturing processes and also at times, packaging. As much as solo, the product design professionals are expected to work with team synergies.

Other soft skills that greatly influence an effective and meaningful product design, is the skill of `design thinking', ideation and communication with good presentation abilities.

Opportunities

The scope to offer professional services in product design is vast, especially with the drive for make in India and design in India initiative. This can be either after a bachelors or masters degree, depending on the scholastic interest of the incumbent. Listed below are some of the areas where there are flourishing job opportunities. Each of these sectors have a variety of different industries where the designer can contribute:

Design for industry: Projects focus on products and services for consumer needs, manufacturing and economic impact. Some examples are furniture, automotive, domestic appliances, medical equipment, sports equipments, hardware, phygital products, industrial equipment, etc.

Design for quality of life: Projects focus on design and development of products and services that improve the quality of living in home, office and public environments.

Design for healthcare: Projects leverage the power of design thinking to find unique ways to address the basic challenges of health, survival and progress faced by underserved populations in the Indian context.

Design for social impact: Projects look at developing scalable solutions to problems of urban mobility, sustenance and social equity that are people-centric and embrace sustainable values.

Design for sustainability: This explores how design can influence an ecologically responsible approach to development of products, systems and environments. This would help students realise and thus maintain the delicate relationship between the technosphere and the biosphere

Design for speculative futures: The impact of the covid pandemic has been immense and has brought in disruptive lifestyle changes in almost all domains of living. Projects focus on the enormous challenges that the country would face in the coming decades in terms of population, health, mobility, sanitation, energy and ecology. Today's technologies are used as a basis to project the future, and concepts generate frameworks to evolve and guide society and behaviour in the future.

Design for education: Projects related to spreading the design culture in schools by way of innovative education games and toys.

Therefore

The mode of providing services can be either as an employee of an organisation or design agency or offering services as a free lance designer. If one is adventurous enough, one can even consider start-up for some service or product. Financial rewards for this profession are attractive and have a good scope to scale up depending on performance, project deliveries and if in the self employed sector, the capacity to undertake several projects with equal success and efficiency. All in all, one of the most exciting, rewarding and inspiring professions!

(The author is the Dean - Design Culture, ARCH College of Design & Business)