What I learned from my first year as a Solo Industrial Designer
September, 2024 marked my one year as the sole Industrial designer within Hoshizaki, and there are a ton of things I got to experience and learn designing products for the real world as I had to stick to tight deadlines, understand team goals, and most importantly design for manufacturing. Here are a few major points that stood out -
Wearing different Hats: As the sole Industrial designer on the team, a lot of my tasks also involved understanding varying different perspectives along with just designing a good product, I would often try judging my sketches and concepts from an engineering/technical point of view to better understand what ideas to kill and what to keep.
More than just Sketching: On my first project at Hoshizaki, I remember pasting 100+ concept sketches on the wall and calling my manager for a review session - quickly realized that I just confused my team and that's when it clicked as an industrial designer my role is not limited to sketching (or generating concepts) but also to pick the directions I would see my company proceeding with - This crucial experience helped understand what goes behind decision making - I resorted to always show the best 3 concepts based on the current constraints.
Designing to sell: As I was working with a highly cross-functional team with people from Marketing, engineering, and management backgrounds I quickly understood my presentation techniques needed to change in order to pitch my concepts for further consideration. I made use of my visual storytelling chops to create detailed renders that talked about materials, and part splits early on in the ideation phase, and used storyboarding to paint use cases to higher management.
Designing for Manufacturing: I quickly realised that being a sole Industrial Designer I had to constantly communicate with Engineers, understand our manufacturing constraints and design around that - Going deep into what materials we were going to spec out, what Manufacturing processes I was thinking, and also understanding how multiple parts could be assembled - Small variations made a huge difference in costs, and as a designer, I learned to quickly explore and pitch different variations.
Picking the right battles: I understood what it is like to manage the needs and constraints of different departments and how I could navigate my designs Often times I had to make changes to designs in leu of costs and manufacturing constraints, But I also got to learn when I could speak up and stand with my concepts for being picked.
This last year was an amazing journey and I got to learn a lot of new ways of designing, picked up a brand new Ideation process, and a new way of sketching - I dived deeper into optimizing my design process, and devled more into digital iterations. Working for a manufacturing company like Hoshizaki also helped me better understand the various manufactuing constraints and processes followd in the industry. It was fun to play around out 3D printed prototypes of the highes quality and work on products that would soon hit the market.
