How do you explain what you do?

Just show your new flip/cam cell phone and remind them about their 10 lbs Nokia cell phone of 15 years ago. Tell them that ID people designed the new one!

What do you say to explain ID?

Aah that old chest nut. A question that has a variable answers:

To the business man: ID is the physical, useful, usable and desirable embodiment of a brand. It is the marketing promise for-filled. The consumer satisfied.

To the lower/est common denominator: What was the last thing you purchased? “Blah” A product designer made you choose that one by making it look the like something you would want, at the price you could afford, over the other products on the same shelf / shop, etc …

To engineers who think that ID/ers have no credibility then I would suggest that you do not really understand engineerings relative place within business. True, it is far easier / more common place for engineering to be mutually exclusive but that does not mean that ID has any less value … to those businesses at least that understand the benefit of incorporating it into their strategy … which as you (Guest) point out is limited by IDers ability to justify the features and benefits their skills can bring to businesses ability to make money … and in the common language of business.

Shut the hell up. Don’t give us that thight upper lip British off tangent answers.

…uhm, your coming off like a total asswipe. It’s a good answer.

a gekoid always you will be

I agree with the idiot called guest!

i missed the party

Good to see yet another potentially interesting and informative Core77 discussion thread hijacked and deteriorate into a waste of time for all concerned - I thought this place was supposed to moderated.

Force the registration core 77 !!

I just drop the “Industrial” and say I’m a Designer. People understand what a designer does. I’ve found that even if I get into a long winded expalnation of what ID is people still don’t get it. If they are truly interested in what I do they tend to ask and I will elborate often excitedly…

One of the best conference events I’ve ever seen was at IDSA’02 in Monterey. Dan Buchner and Katrina Galway (and a bunch of others) organized a workshop on giving the elevator pitch. About 40 people got up on a small stage, with Dan operating a countdown timer, and had 2 minutes (I think) to give their elevator pitch speech about what they do. You didn’t have much time to prepare, depending on how far down the list you were. Meanwhile, we were watching all the people do theirs and giving them a ranking.

The organizers videotaped everything, tallied the totals, and shared the best examples with the rest of the conference.

It was pretty amazing stuff. We had a great discussion at the end of the 40 pitches about what we thought worked and what some of the best principles were.

One takeaway that seems relevant here (if that story isn’t relevant) was that you needed to find a way to really condense the story down to very little - that you didn’t have a lot of time and that editing it down took a bit of work.

I make it real simple, I tell them we make stuff cool. I take old crappy shite nobody buys anymore and turn it into cool new stuff everybody will want.
Or sometimes I’ll say I’m the creative and artistic side of engineering. The easiest way I find is to just show an example. See this product, what don’t you like about it…we fix it, make sure it works correctly for you, and we try to find ways to make it even better and do more things. Then I’ll just show cause and effect…without us, computers would still be beige, bikes wouldn’t have shox, everything would be ugly, uncomfortable, and hard to use.
It is a hard thing to describe shortly mostly because regular people don’t think about it. You tell them you’re an architect, they know…you make buildings, they’ve been exposed to that. But nobody really thinks how products get made, don’t realize somebody made decisions on shapes, colors, and functions.

I think I will just say “Product Designer”. Then if they want to know more, I will say I design a product according to the market’s demand, whether it’s ergonomics, technological or aesthetically driven, and give the product the value that you will be willing to pay for.

that’s exactly what i say all the time…basically “dumbing it down” for them to understand a little easier…

i agree… i ALWAYS say “product design”

then follow up with:
me = “who designs vacuum cleaners?.. vacuum cleaner designers, right?”
them = *vague nod
me = “who designs hair dryers?.. hair dryer designers”
them = “uh huh”
me = “who designs ceiling fans?.. ceiling fan designers”
them = “ok”
(this goes on for about 10 more products)
then i say “WRONG!”
*punch in the face
then i politely explain how they are really all “product designers”

occasioanlly i even go as far as to slip in, “Industrial design is the more official name.”

I never ever say im just a “designer”… to me it seems like most idiots associate that to graphic or web design, and i’m too proud to be regarded as such.

Too proud? What does that mean. I am an industrial designer, graphic designer and web designer. I have degrees in both ID and GD and a certificate in web. I have practiced all three but now am focussed on graphic and web design.

I am no prouder being a graphic designer than I was a product designer. I am proud to be a designer.

I live in a neighborhood full of engineers, some of them even have titles like “product designer” (usually refers to an engineer who does a lot of up front engineering work befor it gets passed on to a tooling engineer) so I usually stay away from that one.

Usually I roll with saying “I’m a designer”. It gets people thinking about a creative profession and then when they ask what I design, I say products, and they’re like “ohhh, is that a lot of math?” to which I say “nope, a lot of thinking and sketching, I basiclly get paid to do what I got yelled at for doing in the back of math class”, and then they say, “wow, sounds like the best job” and I go, “yeah, pretty much is, so what do you do?”

The predictability of the above conversation is killing me, but I can’t think of a better way to explain it to non-creartive people. I was just curious what other people use.

So you couldn’t keep a job in the first, and just went down the chain until you found a job competing with highschool drop outs who just happened to be good at making web pages on their cracked copies of dreamweaver and flash…um from 35-40k average starting pay ID to $8 hour web design. Yeah I would be proud to tell that story…of failure

I agree with the punch in the face. Unfortunately most people think the correct answer to those questions is engineers. I’m constantly surprised that even in popular automotive magazines, where they should KNOW BETTER, editors constantly applaud the engineers for styling.

Really unfortunate is that in many cases it is in fact the engineers who design those things.

So is that tape available? Sounds like a terrific excercise–I’d be fascinated to hear the pitches.

Then to see if their in fact the RIGHT pitches, I’d love to see a bunch of executives give THEIR pitch of what design means to them and their organization.

PS: I personally tailor my pitch by audience and time alotted, but I never fail to mention that I’m the “advocate of the end user.”