I had been a freelance designer for 13 years when my wife came into my office with an obscure job listing from a local newspaper. The ad listed a few creative skills ranging from design to photography but did not include a title for the position offered. Curious and growing weary of being a one-man show, I called the number and the recruiter on the other end arranged an interview at his office. At the meeting, the recruiter handed me a three-paged document which read more like a laundry list of skills and duties than an actual job description.  He said that it was the most unusual set of requirements that he had been given in his career as a head hunter and that it came from a fast growing local company.

The president of the company searching for design talent, and industrial engineer, did not ask for an industrial designer, and the job description he wrote included duties that were not strictly in the realm of what industrial designers do every day, but they were all things that I had done for my clients out of necessity. Interestingly, I used the “shopping list” approach with many of my clients as a way to increase the scope of services provided in order to limit the volume of new clients I needed to stay afloat. In addition to product design, I wound up managing graphic design, photography, ad campaigns, trade show booths, video production, web design, technical writing, marketing, etc.

 I landed the job that I’ve had for nearly 14 years now, by focusing on a broad range of opportunities to add value. I’ve kept the job because I was willing to expand that range into operations, finance, six sigma, engineering and nearly every other aspect of the business. It certainly has not been the classical route to pure industrial design; the president who hired me was not even aware that the profession existed. This lack of awareness, which pushed me to do so much education with clients in my freelance days, persists in the manufacturing world today, and this is the point of my response to this thread in the forum: If, as an industrial designer, you are willing to be open-minded about the scope of your interests, there are countless opportunities to provide value to manufacturers of a dizzying array of products. Many of those manufacturers are unaware of the talent pool available to them in the form of professional creative generalists who can use the industrial design mentality to improve the design of everything from the products being manufactured on the shop floor to the design of the business itself.

Much of the innovation impacting manufacturing today stems from pressures to do more with less—to produce more efficiently in an environmentally sustainable way. This begins with the business model and comes to life as a value stream, or value web made up of many constituents and moving parts. The industrial design philosophy is uniquely extensible into this realm of “business design” and, while most of the people I encounter in business may not understand what industrial design really is, they are more than willing to pay for the value that design thinking demonstrates on the bottom line.