Industrial designers design complex items that are needed by industry. These include non-commercial products such as equipment and machinery to transport goods. Industrial design has strong links with product design.
Industrial designers either:
- Work on new products
- Improve existing products (for example, how to make a product easier to use, more efficient, cheaper or better looking).
Designers of both new and existing products have to consider issues such as:
- A products reliability
- How it will be manufactured
- The materials that will be used.
Industrial designers will work as part of a team with other skilled people such as engineers. Industrial designers have extensive technical knowledge of type of industry they are designing for. As the designs are likely to be complex, computers are used for simulation. They may show what the design will look like and how it will work. Industrial designers may also get involved with the manufacture and testing of samples for evaluation. These samples or working models can then subsequently be changed.
As well as actually designing products, designers will frequently be required to build proposals and briefs for new projects.
