How industrial designers can become “The Bridge” between physical/digital
In search for the missing link between physical and digital that will enable more meaningful and tangible experiences.
In my 10+ years working for both in-house teams and design consultancies I’ve had the opportunity to work for large, Fortune 500 companies as well as early-stage startups. During this time, I’ve experienced how most teams struggle to break out of their silos in order to create experiences and services that feel unified and seamless to their users. These are experiences that manage to blur the lines between their digital and physical instances.
Over the past couple of decades, companies have relied heavily on digital solutions alone, to the point of rendering apps a commodity. In the short term, this makes economic sense, as it is far cheaper to ship a digital solution than it is to develop a physical product. But the future will belong to those companies who manage to look beyond the screen to envision more meaningful and differentiated experiences.
In this post I’ll share some of my thoughts on how industrial designers, when involved early on in the process, are critical in designing as well as executing end-to-end experiences that sit at the intersection of physical and digital, helping connect the dots between siloed teams along the way.
Seeing physical touchpoints as a differentiator, not an afterthought
When a user walks into an Amazon Go store, grabs a few items and leaves without ever directly interfacing with any technology, the experience feels like magic. Rest assured it’s so much more than fairy dust. The space is jam-packed with a slew of technological innovations, all perfectly orchestrated to make the experience seem effortless. It requires multiple, perfectly coordinated efforts from separate teams within the organization to turn make-believe into reality. The end result is a memorable experience that will stay in a user’s mind and leave them asking — why hasn’t this been done before?
In a world where digital solutions have become all but ubiquitous, new, tangible experiences are desperately needed. In this new paradigm, the purposeful integration of digital solutions within a physical space, environment or object becomes the key that will soon open a whole new array of business models and market opportunities.
Bringing an industrial designer into the fold early on can ensure teams are looking at the problem from both the digital and physical ends of the spectrum from day one, resulting in a more cohesive experience.
Why is Industrial Design up for the challenge? Before there was even a term to describe a user experience or digital interaction, physical artifacts — namely consumer electronics, anything from appliances to the early personal computers — had to be envisioned, designed, and fabricated. One could argue that design in the tech industry began to quite literally take shape with the help of the Industrial Design profession. The main goal back then was to create functional, aesthetically pleasing, manufacturable, physical solutions that improved people’s lives.
Today, mainly due to cost, Industrial Design has a tendency to come in late in the design process, once a problem has been defined and research insights have been collected, often to the detriment of the end result; services, products, and experiences with physical touchpoints that time and again feel like an afterthought.
Tearing down language barriers by making the intangible, tangible
Industrial designers have historically been taught to be generalists. It is through that tradition we find ingrained within our craft a focus on ergonomics, user-centered design, and problem-solving. That flexibility and versatile training is the key that can help tear down barriers between multidisciplinary teams in the interest of designing integrated experiences.
When I was leading the design and deployment of concierge-style, medical clinics for SF-based healthcare startup Forward, our key players spoke different languages. Architect consultants spoke in floorplans and elevations; our in-house UX designers in journey maps and frameworks; leadership in business models; UI designers in wireframes, and our engineers in code.
This led to assumptions being made and general confusion across disciplines in the early stages of our endeavor. A lot would get lost in translation, and we were tasked to bring the novel idea of a proactive, tech-enabled yet approachable primary care service to life, from scratch, in under 10 months …but our team felt like the Babel tower.
So, what did I do? I reached into my ID bag of tricks, started connecting the dots and things began to “click”.
I was lucky enough to have the trust and support of the founders from day one. I worked with leadership to hone in on the main aspects of the new business so I could structure a brief that would better communicate those requirements to our architects, in a language and visual medium that both parties could understand. I worked hand-in-hand with our UI/UX team so both our physical and digital experiences felt unified and not like two separate products. Taking a cue from our software engineers, I broke the entire clinic design into modular components that could be modified individually as our technology, locations and service offering changed over time.
The entire space was digitally modeled and rendered following our user journey, highlighting each touchpoint from a user point of view to get buy-in from our investors before breaking ground. In the spirit of continuous testing and iteration, we created a built-to-scale prototype of a fully functioning clinic to allow us to train our medical team, test our custom-made devices and improve the experience by seeing actual patients, months before opening our first location.
This experience opened my eyes to the untapped potential industrial designers have by making solutions tangible, bridging the physical and digital divide and helping unify teams along the way.
Looking beyond the product towards holistic experiences
There’s a new generation of industrial designers that have begun to look beyond the physical product alone to better fulfill user needs and join in the creation and implementation of cohesive, end-to-end experiences. They tend to work in smaller teams and wear several different hats. The constant change keeps them on their toes, always on the lookout to learn new skills that blur the lines between design disciplines.
Industrial designers, especially those with a multidisciplinary background have the right skillset to provide the much-needed connective tissue between other design teams and leadership. This is the design role I refer to as “The Bridge”.
Designers that fit this description have the ability to visualize how physical and digital solutions can come together inside a given physical context or spacial environment. They are not afraid of crossing disciplinary borders and learning from other skillsets. Whether it’s facilitating alignment workshops, performing user research or going back to the drawing board, each new skill enables them to communicate concepts and ideas in tangible ways. In short, they have a particular set of tools that, in a predominantly digital world, give them an edge; the ability to translate thinking into doing.
Embracing change to uncover a promising future
In the last few decades, ID has been going through some significant changes and unfortunately not all of it has been good. The digital revolution has impacted job prospects and earning power in the field. With a new focus on services and software as opposed to physical products, demand for multiple hardware solutions has diminished. New design specializations like user experience, interaction design, research, and design strategy have branched out and become all the rage in the workforce. Meanwhile, traditional Industrial Design seems to have fallen by the wayside.
On the other hand, we live in an exciting time where companies are starting to realize the importance of envisioning multimodal experiences outside of the 4-sided constraints of a screen. Products that feel integrated with their environment and context. Experiences that go beyond the app.
Now more than ever, there is a place for concrete, tangible solutions in this ever-changing, ephemeral, digital world. This is where industrial designers come in. Instead of shying away from change we should embrace it!
As digital solutions become pervasive there’s an untapped opportunity for designers that wish to gain a seat at the table by reaching across teams to connect different disciplines in the interest of building end-to-end, holistic, and material experiences.
