You got AI, so do you still need an Industrial Designer?

 AI's attempt at a Spork - given the prompt "An injection-moulded plastic spork, features a sleek, ergonomic handle that tapers to a broad head. The head combines a shallow spoon bowl with tines for fork functionality, all in food related colors.

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Thinking back to the 80s when desktop publishing reared its head, providing everyone with tools to create fantastic graphics and layouts, people viewed this as the end of graphic design as a profession. It wasn’t! Graphic  and visual designers are still very much part of the creative landscape, specialists at optimally utilizing the desktop publishing software.

These days AI has become ubiquitous infiltrating every aspect of our lives whether we’re aware of it or not.  It’s either fantastic, terrifying or bloody useless.  And with every AI interaction, my perception of it changes.

I wanted to see in the year 2025, if AI is a threat to an Industrial Designer’s job.
My first attempts at generating a very simple single body part using various AI platforms resulted in a relatively adequate result. But in the time AI took to understand what I wanted, I had completed the task, and way more, in CAD.

In reality industrial designers don’t work on single parts, but when they do, they are usually not simple. They have a stylized form, ergonomic, manufacture and other constraints that are closely determined by the designer. In various AI systems I utilized, I got some crazy outputs looking nothing like I described, and therein may be some merit. Using AI for idea generation, for thinking outside our scope of reference (an AI hallucination). Producing beautiful pictures of these crazy objects, definitely could help trigger a new aesthetic or ideas from the designer.

A different AI's attempt at a Spork - given the same prompt.

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Actually the most useful thing I have found so far is the ability to generate spur gear profiles which are pretty technically challenging. This is basically an exercise in maths and generally not something industrial designers tend to like to do.

However digging deeper, I it seems that the promise of AI in design design is more in engineering side of possibly refining and iterating design. Features already available in better CAD software, but require specialist training to really set up correctly and confidently rely on the results. Maybe AI will help make these easier, but you will still have to know the right question to ask it. 
 
AI will be a great tool and while for the short term to medium term, I don’t think Industrial/ Product designers need worry that AI is a threat to their jobs I think in time when you have a product designed it will be industrial designers that have skills in using AI that would provide better value.

With or without AI, Bortz Product Design continues its commitment to provide a client-centered approach from concept to manufacturing specification, ensuring both Bortz Product Design and our Clients enjoy the design experience and have fun in the process.

 This AI's attempt at a Spork - given the same prompt. Not great at pretty pictures, but it did generate a good spur gear :-)