After doing 5 years of architecture, you need a break from designing, sit back and relax. During the course of 5 long years, all-nighters, lots of redos, and coffee breaks you have developed a unique skill set of softwares, creativity, visual understanding, and psychology.
Providing architectural services trains you for a user interface experience, analyzing the needs of clients, and creating their dream into reality is your forte. This is a similar kind of problem-solving and designing innovation required for the product designing process.
What is Industrial Designing?
Industrial designing is professionally designing the products, objects, appliances with the prime focus of appearance, functionality, and manufacturing. The products that one encounters daily are a part of this and have undergone an extended process of research, design making, manufacturing, and finishing to finally reach the consumer to make their life easy with this well-designed product.
Difference Between Product Designing and Industrial Designing
Product Design and Development – it is considered as a subpart of Industrial designing. The production process is personalized and is done for a small quantity and does not require any CAD software. It is about creating artistic and aesthetic products. This is about creating solutions.
Industrial Designing- it is a mass production process and requires a knowledge of softwares with experience in manufacturing business models. This takes into consideration from start till end manufacturing account. Some examples are Dyson cyclone vacuum, KitchenAid stand mixer
Another sub-category under Industrial designing is Furniture designing
Furniture Designing
Architecture and Furniture designing have a lot in common, the main link is understanding the client’s behavior and requirements. In architecture, the scale of projects is large while in furniture designing the scale is small but at the end of the day what matters is that it is comfortable to the users. While designing a house or a table, research, anatomy, designing, specifications, and execution the process is the same, it’s just a matter of scale and proportion.
The architecture or product designing process is both a constituent of designing according to functionality and trend. Both have to imagine interiors or exteriors keeping in mind the client requirement, materials, anatomy, and sustainability. Designers have an eye for grids and patterns, an understanding of layout, plot drawings and plans, good communication and listening skills, and spatial design skills as they relate to dimension and structure.
Skills Required for Product Design and Development
There are some transferable skills from architecture to product designing.
User Understanding
Having empathy, i.e to understand and adapt to other person feelings and experiences, and bring that into designing the products. The habit of observing our surroundings as an Architect helps to perceive the thought process of the user.
Architects have not only trained themselves to understand the psychology of other people but also to grasp the surroundings, vegetation, site analysis, and climate and accordingly derive concepts, so this knowledge makes an Architect the jack of all trades.
Redo has taught a lot
After getting a lot of redos, Architects develop a shield from which in turn helps them to give up on an idea or concept and move on to another fresh one real fast.
This is really helpful in the product designing process, fast learning through repetitive trying is an essential requirement
Research! Research! Research!
A skill mastered by all architects is the art of research. The initial level is researching typology, then site, climate, sustainable techniques, or user anatomy. The various methods of researching are also explored through surveys, interviews, the internet, or books.
This is a great advantage for product designing as it generates a sense of initiation and develops a proper, systematic procedure before beginning product design and development.
Visual treat
The habit of romanticizing a concept, or picturing a piece of barren land to a multistoried building is a commendable factor and this increases the visualization horizon and takes it to a higher level.
Similarly, in product designing the key role is to visualize a problem and find a solution to it at the same time making it look aesthetically pleasing and treat to the eyes. The solution should also be presented or communicated to the client at the beginning stage. So, at the same time presentation and communication of visual ideas which are in the designers head should be explained to the end-user which brings us to the next – technical skills
Technical skills
Architects are comfortable with digital drawing and animation softwares for 3D views or walkthroughs, also are well versed with systematic thinking, and can simultaneously think about both smaller or bigger pictures i.e work on both intricate details and planning processes.
This is effective for the product designing process. For designing the products the softwares which is used works on the same principle. Apart from this sketching also helps in the transformation.
Some of the softwares are
- Adobe illustrator
- Adobe photoshop
- Autocad
- Blender
- 3ds max
- Grasshopper
Architects that Work in Product Designing in India.
Gomaads
The firm started in 2013 that works on lifestyle product design and development made out of concrete and is started by Gopendra Singh and Malavika Singh Gupta coming from architecture backgrounds.
Their ideology is that concrete is a versatile material that can take many forms and can blend with the surroundings. Their firm is Noida-based.
Studio Wood
They are a collaborative design studio, who aims for product designing in India. The firm has three co-founders- architect (Sahej Bhatia), interior designer (Navya Aggarwal), and product designer (Vrinda Mathur) and together they create amazing furniture designs. The services are for residential as well as commercial.
Saif Faisal Design Workshop (SFDW)
This is a Bangalore-based interdisciplinary industrial design studio started in 2014. The studio not only works in furniture but also in Lighting, crafts, Urban Farming (Aquaponics), Architecture & Interiors, Brand Identity, Design Development, Creative Direction, Motorcycle design, Automotive racing & Jewelry Design. The founder Saif Faisal did architecture and works on the ideology of ‘essentialism.’
UI/UX Design
What is a UI/UX Designing?
An UXer will work to ease the work of the user and improve the accessibility of the product.
The product designers work on the requirements of the business compared to the UX designers who care about users’ needs.
There are a few overlapping similarities between a UX designer and a product designer. To begin with, both designers will go through the design thinking process and maintain a human-centered approach when it comes to design. Both have a market-driven approach to their job. Also, both use the same type of software. Nowadays, both can be used interchangeably.
Conclusion
Architecture teaches us many design skills which can be transferred to many other design disciplines. It might seem difficult to give it all up but it is better to discover your true potential and take the leap. The core purpose of product designing is to solve problems and this is a quality mastered in 5 years of academic practice.
