A type of
mechanical engineer whose job is to develop products that will be
mass produced. Industrial Designers tend to focus less on the
kinematics or
dynamics of the
end product, and more on its
static qualities, such as
shape,
assembly,
presentation, and
material constitution.
In developing a new product, the good industrial designer will have to take into account the following considerations:
Quality
Ergonomics
For some reason,
Scandinavians seem to be predisposed to good
industrial design. You may say what you will about the style of
Ikea's furniture, but its design seems to
maximize the
root mean square of the above factors. Industrial Design ends up being as much an
art form as it does an
engineering discipline, and it is not uncommon to see
sculptors and industrial designers try their hands at each other's craft.
As of the turn of the millenium, most industrial design work is done in front of a computer workstation. Industrial designers can expect to work with fancy CAD and modelling software on even fancier computers, a la Silicon Graphics.
The advantages of a career as an industrial designer include the chance to build things that are universally acknowledged as cool, even to small children, an engineering career that does not require intimate knowledge of such things as UARTs or tensors or dynamic viscosity, and the opportunity to work in a field that will never become obsolete.
The disadvantages of the industrial designer include the possibility of working on extremely boring looking projects, disrespect from co-workers in more technically intense (but usually no more difficult) fields, and the chance that your bad design might end up injuring or killing someone.
If you like puzzles and putting things together, you might like being an industrial designer.