The Boundary of Design and Engineering

People always say you are either creative or a technical person. I watched the Apprentice on the BBC and Lord Sugar said he has never met a creative engineer before. I would like to disagree and say there are plenty of those types of people.

People I have worked with in the past have been either a designer or an engineer or like me a PDE. I like being both and blurring the lines between the two disciplines. However, it does leave me thinking that I am a bit of a "jack of all trades, master of none" but so far it's only been an advantage in my career.

I graduated with an undergraduate Masters degree in Product Design Engineering. It was a lot of hard work and fun, of which I will discuss those stories in another post. So back to this one, it was a combination of design and engineering. I got to go to Glasgow School of Art for product design engineering as well as University of Glasgow to do mechanical engineering. Everything I did was project based learning at the art school with the initial stages of design work always required research concept generation with the core being user centred design. We all tinkered with things always tried to apply our engineering knowledge to develop concepts and make them feasible. It was always a hands on design process. You come up with an idea, sketch it to investigate the details, maybe do some back of the envelope calculations but you would always head into the workshop to build and try out your idea. So I have never seen anything different. I have always moved between the boundaries of these disciplines. I believe that by combining both design and engineering you are able to truly create elegant design solutions. Where aesthetics and mechanical aspects can act together and therefore breakout from the normal of having "something" wrapped in a shell.

So when people say you are either one or the other I disagree, you can't really have one without the other. The best designers I have ever work with had a lot of engineering knowledge and vice versa with engineers that I have met and worked with in the past.

So being a person that believes in user centered design processes as well as having understanding in engineering principles. I think we could all better ourselves by understanding both disciplines and not just accept that there is a boundary. Designers and engineers need to get rid of this "toss over the fence" attitude to designing products. When we know how each other work and include each other in the design process you open up the chance to achieve awesomeness and enlightenment lol. I just couldn't resist doing something funny at the end as everything got a little bit too serious lol Sorry for the rant :)