Understanding Design
“Because there is a need, we do it.”
Compared to traditional disciplines that delve into specific academic subjects, my thoughts and actions revolve more around the lives of those around me. I always first see the challenges you and I face in reality, then think about what I can do. Therefore, I’ve never sought to polish a particular technology to a specialized, cutting-edge degree. Instead, I’ve focused more on the journey of solving problems, big and small, that I encounter. I also hope that my understanding of the objective world is as accurate and objective as possible, allowing me to make truly effective action decisions, rather than operating in an imagined world. My decisions regarding further education, earning money, what to study, or any other plans are all driven by this approach.
This is also what attracts me to design. It’s at the intersection of imagination and the world, transforming observations and understanding into constructive solutions. And when these solutions are brought back into reality, they, in turn, rectify our perception gaps about the world. Whether an idea is viable depends not only on its ability to move people but also on whether it can be used, understood, manufactured, maintained, and how much it improves the original problem.
If you are interested in life and the world, but don’t want to remain solely in words and observation; if you love concrete objects, materials, and structures, but don’t want to create only technology itself; if you have keen observations and insights, and wish for these perceptions to transform into creative power, then design might be an excellent direction for you.
Different Kinds of Design
Design shares a common foundation: your creations have an audience and users, and the experience of that audience and those users is extremely important. Here, I’ll introduce a few major specializations related to industrial design:
Visual Communication Design is closer to information, images, typography, branding, and visual systems. It concerns how information is seen, understood, and remembered.
Interaction Design focuses more on the relationship between people and systems. This system could be an app, a website, a device interface, or even a more complex service process. It cares about how users act, how feedback occurs, and whether the experience is smooth.
Product Design and Industrial Design have a lot of overlap, but their nuances might differ slightly depending on the school’s context. In some schools, Product Design leans more towards physical products, while others might include services, systems, UX, or business strategy. Industrial Design, on the other hand, typically emphasizes the relationship between physical products and industrial production: materials, structures, manufacturing, usage, and mass production possibilities are all taken into consideration.
UI/UX appears more often in the context of digital products. UI leans towards interface and the visual layer, while UX focuses more on user experience, information architecture, interaction logic, and user paths.
There are no absolute boundaries between these categories. Many projects span multiple design directions. For example, a smart hardware product might simultaneously require industrial design, interaction design, UI, service design, and brand design.
Industrial Design
The world is full of information asymmetry. Specialists aren’t always adept at taking technology and applying it in the real world to achieve practical, effective results. On the flip side, those in market-facing roles might struggle to truly differentiate between various specialists.
Industrial design stands precisely between depth and breadth.
On the deep end, it can involve materials, structures, interaction, CMF, design research, etc. On the broad end, it can encompass product strategy, user research, brand experience, commercialization, etc.
Regardless of the depth, industrial design’s inherent user-centered mindset will always involve ‘breadth.’ During product implementation, this includes selecting relevant technologies and materials, and understanding how materials, structures, users, production, and the market influence each other.
It also stands between art and engineering. Engineering supports function, structure, and manufacturability; art and creativity handle those aspects that are harder to quantify: human perception of form, material, color, tactile sensation, emotion, and meaning. Therefore, industrial design cannot solely be about subjective expression, nor can it merely view a product as a sum of its functions. It needs to understand real problems within real-world constraints, then organize capabilities from different fields into a cohesive solution.
A Brief Chat about Career Paths
As a soon-to-be freshman, I’m not yet capable of offering mature career guidance. Here, I can only share the preliminary information I currently have, to give you a basic idea of the possible future directions in industrial design. (My thanks to Prof. Rudi and Minki, whose invaluable support allowed me to initially understand the content below.)
If you plan to study industrial design, you can generally see two paths, which are not mutually exclusive: the academic route and the engineering/application route.
The Academic Path
The academic path, at its core, extends design from a ‘creative act’ to a ‘way of knowing.’ It isn’t satisfied with simply creating a useful product but seeks to answer: Why is this design effective? Its core task is knowledge production: refining the design wisdom implicit in materials, forms, and interaction processes into systematic knowledge that can be discussed, verified, and passed down.
If you take this path, you might spend several years focusing on specific and profound problems. After your undergraduate degree, you could pursue research-oriented master’s or doctoral programs (such as a PhD in Design) or other research-based projects to go deeper. This is a path rooted in long-term thinking, where the reward lies not in immediate implementation, but in the accumulation of understanding and the contribution of new knowledge.
Publications
At the graduate level, research findings need to be published to enter the discussion within the academic community. However, the publication system for design research is not entirely the same as journals like Nature or Science in the natural sciences.
In the fields of design, HCI (Human-Computer Interaction), and interaction, conferences play a far more central role than in other disciplines. This is determined by the nature of the field:
Rapid knowledge iteration: Design is closely intertwined with technology, and new technologies often emerge and update within months. Conferences typically take only about half a year from submission to publication, while journals often take a year or more, making them unable to keep pace.
Practical knowledge is difficult to fully capture in papers: A large amount of a designer’s knowledge exists in prototypes, material experiments, production processes, and exhibitions. This information is better disseminated through presentations at conferences.
Community building: Conferences themselves connect people, serving as a central arena for researchers in the field to meet face-to-face, collaborate, and form an academic community.
Conferences usually offer various publication formats, such as Full Papers, Short Papers, Demo/Exhibition, and Workshops, to meet the dissemination needs of research at different stages.
Conference Introduction
In the interdisciplinary field of design research and HCI, the conference system generally includes the following:
CHI (ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems) is undeniably the flagship conference in this field. It has an extremely broad scope, covering almost all sub-directions. Publishing a paper at CHI is equivalent to receiving the highest level of academic recognition in the field.
Below CHI, there are a number of more specialized conferences, each focusing on a particular sub-field. I don’t know many, but you can consult AI to explore further.
Among them, two conferences particularly close to industrial design are worth mentioning:
TEI (International Conference on Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction): Explores physical and embodied interaction (haptic feedback, wearables, interactive installations, integration of materials and sensing). If CHI is concerned with the world inside screens, TEI is concerned with the world outside screens: how your hand perceives the temperature of an object, how your body moves in space… For design students who love hands-on prototyping and exploring hardware and materials, TEI is an excellent direction.
DIS (ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems): Focuses on design methods and processes for interactive systems: How to conduct user research? How to build design theory? How to generate knowledge through prototyping? It’s more ‘design-focused’ than CHI, while still retaining a significant technical component, sitting precisely at the intersection of the two. DIS is also where Pictorials originated (first introduced in 2014), so for students interested in design methodology and visual paper formats, DIS holds special significance.
Visual Papers: Pictorial
In the field of design research, there is a unique publication format: Pictorial.
If traditional papers are centered on textual argumentation, then Pictorials are centered on visual storytelling. They present the complete脉络 (context/narrative) of a design study through carefully arranged photos, process documentation, prototype close-ups, sketches, and annotations. (If you’ve done DT IA, you might understand :3)
Pictorials are important because many critical judgments in design research exist within visual and material dimensions and are difficult to fully capture in language. Pictorials allow researchers to articulate research findings using design’s own language (form, material, traces of making), rather than forcefully translating them into text. It has gradually become a widely recognized and distinctive publication category in design research.
Design Awards
If academic conferences are places for knowledge production, then design awards are places where the value of that knowledge is validated. Together, they form a complete closed loop of design research.
Internationally, the iF Design Award, Red Dot Award, and IDEA award are known as the “world’s three major design awards,” serving as the most influential quality indicators in the field of design practice.
For researchers on the academic path, the value of awards lies in this: winning works represent cutting-edge issues that industry is focused on, providing a vivid source for research problems. At the same time, if an academically validated design method wins an award in a competition, it powerfully demonstrates its real-world application value, creating a mutual corroboration of ‘why it works’ and ‘it actually works in reality’ with the research paper. The paper is the foundation; the award is the icing on the cake.
Overall, the academic path is more suitable for those who are interested in research itself. If you find yourself enjoying the complete cycle of questioning, challenging, verifying, and expressing, rather than rushing to push solutions to market, then the academic route is a direction worth exploring in depth. And your research findings will ultimately find their true application in future industrial applications.
The Engineering / Application Path
If the core task of the academic path is knowledge production, then the core task of the engineering/application path is value conversion: transforming proposals into mass-producible, marketable, and sustainable real-world products, based on excellent design.
Taking this path, your thinking will gradually shift from “how to make it look/work better” to “how to build the product without sacrificing quality,” “how to genuinely reach users,” “how to make it commercially viable,” and so on. Whether or not to pursue further education after an undergraduate degree is not a decisive factor in this field; a solid portfolio, in-depth project experience, high-quality internships, and proven execution ability are relatively more persuasive.
Essential Practice
Since we’re talking about engineering and implementation, starting in an established company or design consulting agency is the most direct path to understanding this logic: you’ll see the entire process from sketch to production line, from prototype to shelf. You’ll also realize for the first time that good design is just the first step. Engineering feasibility, quality control standards, brand positioning – these factors, which seem ‘outside of design,’ collectively determine whether a product truly reaches users. Learning to make judgments within constraints is the most crucial skill training in the application route.
Marketing
The results of the academic path enter the academic community through ‘publication’; the results of the application path enter the market and society through ‘marketing.’
Many excellent products in the world might not find their place in the market, and many commercially successful products might not be exquisitely designed. If you have the ability to create good designs, to truly bring them into the world, you also need to understand how to market them.
Moreover, marketing isn’t a finishing task handed off to another department once the product is complete; it participates in defining the project from the very beginning. A good design without a matching communication strategy is likely to remain a potential work rather than an influential product. For designers on the application path, understanding user language, brand logic, and market operations is not deviating from design, but rather an essential skill to make design truly effective.
Conferences and Awards
Front-edge research at academic conferences serves as early signals for industry trends. New interaction paradigms showcased at CHI or novel sensing methods explored at TEI often precede their appearance in consumer products by three to five years. For product designers, seeing these trends early means you can make judgments before industry shifts occur: which technologies truly have practical potential, and which are merely academic toys. This is invaluable foresight, allowing you to make product decisions not just by following the market, but by being able to anticipate what the market is about to do. Furthermore, discussions on user research and prototyping methodologies at conferences can often be directly transferred to industrial design processes, becoming tools to enhance work efficiency and depth.
Meanwhile, international design awards like iF, Red Dot, and IDEA serve as industry endorsement of professional capabilities. Winning an award means your work has been recognized by international experts for its innovativeness, aesthetics, functionality, and feasibility. When seeking employment, this acts as a quality certificate that HR and design directors can quickly recognize. At the same time, the award criteria themselves reflect the industry’s collective definition of ‘good design,’ and reviewing winning works and understanding the judging logic is an effective way to grasp global design practice quality benchmarks.
Academic conferences broaden cognitive boundaries; design awards validate practical standards. For designers on the application path, the former provides nourishment, the latter offers validation.
If you enjoy the process of gradually bringing concepts into reality, are willing to endure the trivialities of implementation, face cost trade-offs, and learn how to ‘speak’ to users through products, then the engineering/application route is a direction worth seriously considering. For me, this is invaluable: I look forward to any real feedback from lives interacting with products, to solve unseen challenges with existing technology.
Conclusion
If you’ve read through this content and felt curious or had questions about any particular path, then this article has already achieved its purpose. The rest, I suppose, you’ll need to slowly experience and understand through your upcoming studies and practice.
I wish you find the path that suits you—or, perhaps, forge your own path :3