<p>I want to study engineering because I want to make stuff like circuits, machines etc. Now I heard that engineers don’t actually design the products, for example, structural engineers just decide the materials, and how to build the building, and the architects actually design the building.
Now I want to both design and make my product. For example, let’s say my boss says that he wants me to make a sandwich. The purpose of the sandwich is to taste good. And then I want to design the sandwich and how the sandwich will look like, and I also decide whether to put mustard or ketchup and then I also put all the ingredients together. I don’t want my boss to decide all the names of the ingredients and everything, and all I do is figure out a way to put the sandwich together.</p>
<p>Oh, I’m not saying that I want to work alone, or do every part myself btw. Engineering is probably much more complicated than making a sandwich that’s only purpose is to taste good.</p>
<p>You can basically choose from industrial design or engineering. Industrial design is the visual/artistic/creative element of some types of product design.</p>
<p>The so called engineering “design” has basically two aspects:
- In some cases the design is the same as the physical implementation. For example circuits are built as functional, they’re not designed to serve other than functional purposes, so they don’t need to “look” or “feel” different.
- In other cases the product may need to be designed in order to be more usable than what it is while being just functional or to appeal to people (people don’t e.g. want to live in houses that all look the same, for some reason). This is generally the job of an industrial designer (or e.g. an architect in the case of buildings and the built environment), who’s a sort of artist with a focus on designing functional and engineered products or making them better from other viewpoints than the purely functional. In most cases this design is basically “not necessary”, in the sense that it doesn’t add to the functionality, but e.g. aesthetics. Why do we need hundreds of different designs for chairs for example? Or forks? Or laptop computers? I hope you get the point. But industrial design can also address things like ergonomics, environmental friendliness or just plain making the product “more usable” in some way.</p>
<p>An industrial designer or an architect thinks what something should look and feel like and how it should be used (like how does the product need to be designed in order to be usable by the user(s) or to be appealing to the users in some particular way, in non-technical sense). An industrial designer can also invent things, but may do it form a non-technical viewpoint (i.e. the presentation of the design is not technical, but a functional idea/concept).</p>
<p>An engineer thinks or invents what people need, what would be useful, how to make things and how to make things easier or functionally better or more optimal and how to use materials/natural resources and physical laws to serve those purposes.</p>
<p>Good industrial design can keep costs low by designing stuff that is appealing, easy to use, yet cheap in the grand scheme of things… But the mechanical engineers are the ones that design the guts of the actual product…</p>