Okay, random question. Does anyone know when the title "Industrial designer" was invented? Or "Design engineer?" I find it funny that no one I asked ever looked it up. I mean, no one's to blame as I looked it up just a few days ago as a part of my research of an essay series from a few weeks ago.
I felt a little bad because most of us know the release year of every phone Apple has shipped, and we don't know the birthday of our own jobs. Funny.
So, let me tell you the whole story because it's a good one, and it ends somewhere useful. Promise.
The origins
With the rise and current living of AI in our day-to-day, I was curious how would the jobs of Industrial Designers (IDs) and Design Engineers (DEs) evolve or change over the next few years and I ended up 'Claude-ing' for hours and indulged in that rabbit hole. What I learned was very exciting but definitely comes with bad news, especially for young (2-8 years of experience) IDs and DEs who are just average at their core-competencies today.
For most of history, ID and DE were one job. The guy who made a clock decided everything from the proportions, gears, brass, the engraving on the back, and even the price. And it'd be the same for most of the objects made back then. There was no word for design because there was nobody to hand the design to.
Then, in the year 1776, Adam Smith writes the book The wealth of nations in which he talks about a pin factory where ten men make forty-eight thousand pins a day through eighteen little operations. Eighteen little operations is the key here. One man doing everything himself could make maybe twenty pins and to solve that comes in the foundation of little operations which made factories exist, and the reason why our jobs exist. Because once you split the work, somebody has to describe the product to all the people making pieces of it.
That's where the drawing comes in. Monge, a French mathematician, worked out a descriptive geometry as a method for describing any 3D object exactly on flat paper. He developed this for French military engineering and it was literally a state secret until 1795. Every engineering drawing you've ever made? Every CAD file? They descend from that.
Anyway, the history of ID & DE role evolution is fascinating and I urge all of you students of the craft of building hardware to spend an afternoon reading through it. I don't want this post to become a paraphrased history lesson. But I'll give you a quick rundown.
Shortly after the concept of interchangeable parts came in and screw threads were standardised. The structural changes led to mass production and appearances of the objects were nobody's job. People started noticing that they were ugly and rejecting these objects. Couple of prolific folks then went back to creating handmade objects that only the rich people could afford. Then in the 1900s, AEG in Germany hires an architect named Peter Behrens to design everything from products, posters, typefaces, buildings, kettles, lamps, fans, you name it. Behrens is the first person a corporation ever employed specifically to design its products. That's the birth year of Industrial design as a job - 1907.
You know the cool part? One of his young assistants, Walter Gropius found Bauhaus in 1919.
Over the next couple of decades, when competing products worked equally well and buyers were not many, the better-looking product sold more. Industrial design started penetrating into Kodak, Sears refrigerators, Bell telephones. And in 1937, Carnegie Tech starts the first American degree programme in Industrial design. And then it was a real profession.
On the engineering side, during the Second World War, mass production of aircraft led to standardisation at scale, and roles divisions started with manufacturing, electrical, mechanical, and design engineer role became popular. Human factors research evolved from studying aircraft accidents which led to the formation of anthropometry, and with Ulm school opening in Germany, Dieter Rams joined and the rest is history.
CATIA launches, AutoCAD launches and then parametric CAD come in with Pro/ENGINEER. Soon after that SolidWorks come in along with Rhino.
IDEO came in with design thinking, Apple's products started showing what well-built hard could be like, and Shenzen started showing the world how great products could be manufactured.
Count it: one job in 1776, two by 1940, roughly ten plus by 2010. That's the whole history in one line, and every split happened for the same reason, the product crossed a complexity line that one head couldn't hold.
The present
Which brings us to now, and to why I'm telling you all this.
If you strip out the titles, an industrial designer runs five to six competencies: research and observation, ideation and sketching, hardware UX and ergonomics, CMF (colour, material, finish), CAD surfacing plus prototyping, and storytelling.
Similarly, a designer engineer system-level problem solving, CAD, tooling and manufacturing knowledge and GD&T, simulation and analysis, validations and reliability testing, and lastly vendor and NPI work.
AI is already in and growing faster than we could imagine. Simulations that needed a specialist now sometimes takes an afternoon. AI has moved into CAD itself checking tolerances, drafts, making render explorations with CMF options. All the stuff that the two functions repeatedly do will get automated first, of course.
The future
Here's what could happen.
ID would become more technical with constraint-aware design tools. It'd mean that first concepts will already have the right wall thickness, draft, component volume, and functional guardrails.The designer who needs an engineer to tell them their surface is impossible will be slower than the one whose tools flag it live.
DEs will take product decisions along with product development managers and industrial designers. Because their tools will take the first crack at geometry, analysis and they'd just be reviewing risks, constraints, and trade-offs.
Anything repeatable and narrow will get automated. Surfacing cleanups, tolerance stack checks, first-pass FEA, render explorations.
Both the roles of IDs and DEs will start recombining. Startups already hire one person who can sketch, surface, build parametric CAD, run basic analysis and talk to vendors, and they improvise the title: hardware product designer, hardware architect, design engineer, whatever suits their fancy.
Only larger companies will keep the specialist titles longer, but the people they promote will increasingly be T-shaped: deep in one role, fluent in the other.
So you see, if you put the future next to the history, the pattern is simply this. Every major tool shift redrew the boundary between these jobs. The drawing created the engineer, the Depression created the designer, CAD merged their desks while Shenzhen's manufacturing focus split them into ten plus. AI is now compressing the narrowest specialisations first.
Which leads to the practical conclusion. For a hundred years, the way to grow in hardware was to specialise, because the narrow skills were scarce (only if you are really good at them). Today, the narrow skills are becoming cheap. The people who grow over the next few years will be the ones who take on scope their title does not require yet: the designer who learns the engineering constraints, the engineer who develops design judgment.