09/2025: Specialization Vs. Generalization  

Image © Jose 2025

I have been surprised by the amount of people, other contractors, our master contractor brings in to do the ‘jobs to be done’ in our house renovation. While he has a crew that does a lot of generic jobs, he brings in dedicated crews for the specialized jobs, and it’s not just the obvious plumber and electrician, he has brought in people that do jobs such as insulation, windows, skylights, HVAC, and a few more I don’t remember. And we are not done, we are technically two months away from us moving in (does not mean completion…).

I was watching a father and son from Latin America do the plasterboard work, we had to make wholes throughout the house ceiling and walls to install insulation which the house needed to pass inspection. The master contractor said, today he would have ripped the ceiling and walls entirely… if you can imagine, the house was full of large openings, exposing the interior beam work, it looked like large strainer. So I looked at it and wondered how easy would be to patch those wholes up, I was concerned about the level of finish that would guarantee a long life to the surfaces, but the contractor said there would be three layers of tape and plaster and that it would look perfect, this is when reputation and trust are more important than a piece of paper. These openings are random shaped, different sizes, and the father son duo was working in sync, one cutting the plasterboard to size and the other screwing it to the beams, with such speed and perfection that can only be achieved when you become a specialist at something. I asked them, this is what they do, plasterboard. I asked them how complicated this was, they said not much. In two days, they completed the job, and now I believe the master contractor when he says it will look perfect.

It made me think about design in general and this push/pull between specialization and generalization. When I went to school for Industrial design, the main activity consisted of a few core skills and a couple others that came in handy; you had to sketch and visualize ideas, and you had to do CAD Computer Aided Design (I started with learning how to do it with rulers, elipses and Rotring ink pens). You needed to understand a bit of human factors and you needed to use Photoshop to improve the result of your outputs. I’m oversimplifying, but I guarantee you that many industrial designers cruised in their jobs by knowing how to do this, the better you were at this, the more curious and the more prone to learning you were, the faster you grew in your career. Fast forward 40 years, not a lot when you think of our young profession, and I look at the extended skills and jobs an industrial designer is expected to do, and the core skills and jobs s/he is seeing eroding with the rise of generic AI tools (a future post on AI in house renovation):

• CORE: You still need to sketch, but now you probably are not using pens/ pencils/ markets, but a tablet of sorts with a software that is specific for sketching, maybe more than one, really another CAD software.
• CORE: You still need to do CAD, you might be using a classic solution or one of the many cloud-based ones that have popped up in the last 10 years, while you may say CAD is CAD, each one has a specific learning curve. You will have to work very closely with your engineering department to make sure there is nothing lost in translation (back then, since 80% of people were not using CAD, you would deliver the drawings on paper, and they would repeat the work in their own way).
• NICE TO HAVE: Human factors have become enormously complex, if you are designing products (not software…) in medical, or in transportation, or in any human related field, you need to really embrace human factors as a specialized route.
• NICE TO HAVE: You may continue to use Photoshop, one the longest lasting software applications around, but now you may have to use one of the many specialized tools for visualization, and since the frontiers of computing have evolved so much, there are no limits of reflections, refractions, pixels per inch, so you see yourself exploring the outer limits of cinematic imagery, dynamic animations, layered content with detailed color, finish, material information, set in context.
• NEW: Buyer and consumer trends and lifestyle information, voice of the customer, customer journeys, experience and service design. You might have the chance to work closely with other designers that are professionals in these domains, but if you are not, and though nobody may require this from you , as an industrial designer you quickly learn that if you don’t do this work, no one else will (even when they tell you that’s someone else job…), and your result will be impacted by its absence.
• NEW: You might be part of a team that has a strong marketing professionals, capable of defining strategic go-to-market plans and then have the internal skills or a budget to hire professionals to create the myriad of creative assets to ensure a good product launch, under strict art direction and coordination, but in many cases you end up having to step up and participate, if not lead, creative direction and execution of storytelling, visual assets and other components that will make a difference in such a crowded marketplace.
• NEW (a short list): Packaging, instruction manuals, patent writing, facilitation, people research, CGI Computer Generated Imagery, …)

Some might say this also happened in the past, it had to do more with what industry you were in (scale, level of complexity). Others might say that, at the core, nothing has really changed, industrial design is still what it used to be, only tools evolved. I have been around long enough to say that things have changed, and in a lot of ways for the better, but I understand if some would like to go back to simpler days and just do the ‘plasterboard’ work of an industrial designer.

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The term “industrial design” first appeared in America in 1919, but it was only when a generation of young designers emerged as industrial designers, among them Raymond Loewy, Walter Dorwin Teague, Henry Dreyfuss, Norman Bel Geddes, and Egmont Arens, that the discipline gained legitimacy. Carroll Gantz, an IDSA Fellow and former President of the IDSA, wrote many articles and at least 2 books about the history of the field. In his book, “Founders of American Industrial Design” he notes that “In June 1936, Carnegie Tech graduated the 1st 5 students ever to receive a college degree in Industrial design” (Gantz, 2014, p.85) He does not state whether it was a 4-year program or something less, but certainly, by the mid-30’s programs had begun. Many other programs followed at different institutions around the country. Pratt Institute in NY had graduates in 1939 from a 3-year program. The University of Illinois established a BFA in 1937. The California Graduate School of design in Pasadena opened a 2-year program that same year, the 1st in the country offering a master’s degree in Industrial design. Cranbrook Academy of Art in Detroit began a program in 1937 as well. This means that we have more than 80 years of design education in the US …