Are we on the same page? Comparing professional practices between industrial designers and mechanical engineers in perceptions and procedures during product development

Abstract

The objective of this research is to find differences between industrial designers and mechanical engineers in perception and procedures during product development. This research has focused on cooperation between multidisciplinary teams’ participants - both industrial designers and mechanical engineers, because current innovation processes require more and more cooperation between many different disciplines. Multidisciplinary cooperation is a valuable research topic to bring more productivity and better understanding to team members. And one of the most frequently seen cooperation in product development projects is the cooperation between the industrial design and mechanical engineering disciplines. Differences between these two disciplines in professional practice are in need of research. Doing this research can provide analyzed results which may reveal the fundamental causes and phenomena. It can provide insights which can help improve performance in projects involving these two disciplines for later cooperation. During this research, eight face-to-face interviews have been performed. Four professional industrial designers and four mechanical engineers have participated in this research. One industrial designer and one mechanical engineer are from the same design agency or organization which has been involved in multidisciplinary projects. Some interesting findings and results have come out. Trainings have been fundamental in forming these professionals’ way of thinking, their way of problem solving and their way of carrying out their skills. Trainings contain two parts - academic training and career training. Academic training influences their knowledge foundation, while career training influences their current approaches on projects with the other discipline. Self-perception and perception of the other discipline have the consistency that designers focus more on shaping and forming the outside of products while engineers focus on functions inside of the products. Industrial designers are more familiar with iterative approaches to diverge and converge in ideas with the aim of getting closer to an optimal solution; Mechanical engineers are often taking a straight-line approach where one solution is worked out in great detail, with the aim of meeting clients/customers’ requirements. Industrial designers see the value of a multidisciplinary team in helping them realize their concept or idea, allowing them to see real progress into prototyping, or even into production. Also they emphasized on how it can improve the quality of products’ credibility. Mechanical engineers see the value of a multidisciplinary team at the social level, helping them learn to communicate with industrial designers. With some success and failure projects which interviewees had experienced, expectations from both sides have been mentioned. The ideal scenario for a working environment, how the working procedures may be improved, and how to solve time and budget limitations are all elaborated. Interviewees also have put some recommendations forward. Their recommendations cover communication issues and issues caused by mutual perception bias. Differences and commonalities of these two disciplines, issues that occur during multidisciplinary cooperation, and new insights have all been written with a general conclusion. This report notes several limitations of its research, and some recommendations for further study will be presented at the end.