Ian Peterman explains when you need a specialized engineer versus a designer for product development. Novel designs, complex physics like fluid dynamics, and safety-critical applications require engineering expertise. Experience and the specific components of your project matter more than job titles.
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Hello, my name is Ian Peterman, CEO and founder of Peterman Design Firm. And today I'm going to answer the question, which I get a lot, is, do I need an engineer for this project? And, you know, as an industrial design trained, that's my degree, but with my experience, experience as a mechanical designer in mechanical engineering world, working on very engineering-focused products, I can say that the answer is maybe. Your product may need an engineer, may not. There's a lot of— the roles between engineer and designer are often blended. And in this day and age, we have a much more blended process where design and engineering talk together, they work together. Sometimes they're able to do projects without the other. You know, the common idea is that engineers make things work but ugly, and designers make things pretty but don't work. And that can be farther from the truth. There's a lot of product development that is done purely by engineers. It works fantastically. It works great. It looks good. It is what you want it to be. And there's designers out there that understand the engineering side of things, really technical details, and they design pretty things that work. There's no problem, they actually function. So, you know, needing an engineer typically on projects that we work on, when you need an engineer, it comes down to things that you're— where you're trying to do something That hasn't been done before in this specific way. And that's when you start needing someone to really do— that needs to do all the math and understand the physics behind the material you're using. And you can get all the way down to, you know, using a material scientist to figure out whether the material can do what it's supposed to. But it's also, you know, and I'm working on, okay, well, we are building this, this product structure this way. Will it hold? Can it, can it actually take all the impacts that we want? Will it survive going underwater to 1,000 meters, for example? Don't know what we're designing here, but apparently it needs to go to 1,000 meters. What does that look like? And, you know, an industrial designer, a designer will typically not be able to do that. That's not their specialty. Once you do things like fluid dynamics and FEA analysis, Looking at, I need this thing, this thing's going to go through an oven. So I started my career designing lasers, and we had to design them based on melting metal, and certain metals in different— you need to melt at different temperatures so you could slowly assemble the product without melting what you already put together. And there's different assembly processes that require knowledge, and that was— In order to do that together. I was the designer and I did all the 3D modeling. I did the design work, but the engineering, the portion where you say we're going to use this specific alloy, solder alloy, in order to melt these, these 2 things and bond them together because it melts at this temperature and it will withstand this and for these many other reasons, that was an engineer. That was not a designer. There was no designer going, oh, I know all the physics behind this material and I'm going to tell you exactly what alloy to the percentage, the exact composition of the alloy we're using in order to build this. And so when you get into those really technical details, you move away, and that's kind of the separation. When you move into those really, really technical details, you need an engineer, and sometimes you need to go into the scientist side and get a material scientist. For general product development, a mechanical engineer and an industrial designer will be able to do pretty much any product. Most of it actually comes down to actual experience in developing products. Engineers straight out of school is going to be like an industrial designer straight out of school. They will know the theory, they will have had some practice, maybe some internships, but they have not designed hundreds of products. They have not walked floors of hundreds of manufacturing floors. They have not worked with every material that's commonly used. They probably have a general idea, right? And they have an understanding, they understand the theory. So when you're looking at your project and you're going, who's going to be— who do I need? Don't just jump to, do I need an engineer or not? That is actually the wrong question to ask. The real question should be, What is the product that I'm trying to develop? What does it contain? What are its components that I'm trying to develop? And do I need a specialist for any of them? Most products, most consumer products, you probably don't need a specialist. Just designer, engineer. You want to build a new KitchenAid product, you want a new mixer, you want a new blender, you can probably work with a generalist on most of that. If you want something— I want to build a robotic submarine that's going to go 2,000 meters under the ocean, be remote controlled, no umbilical cord, come back— that's going to take some engineering. It's going to take people, specialists, specialists that have experience in certain areas to do what do you call real engineering work? The really technical science-based work on that's beyond the average generalist. And that's where you will find, you know, needing an engineer specifically. Outside of that though, designer, engineer, they're, they're able to complete most of developing a lot of products. And you really need to be focused on, do they have the experience relative to what I'm doing? Do they understand the materials that my product needs to work on? Have they worked on a product like mine before? And that is a, you know, that's a variable. You know, I'm, I'm definitely of the mindset that having cross-discipline and cross-industry experience will produce better products. It's something I've seen time and time again, but every now and then having a specialist in your actual product, you know, I'm developing a car. Well, I want somebody who's developed a car before. I want somebody who's worked on car design and engineering. I want a suspension person, things like that. You do want to have some specialists, but again, you start getting into those really complicated, more technical, especially around safety, right? Where mis-engineering it, not designing it properly will be catastrophic in some way. You absolutely want to have an engineer in place. You want to do some work in designing a new house? Well, if it's a normal house that pretty much built the same way every bit— every other house is, some 2x4s and put it together, is great. Well, you don't need an engineer for that. You don't need a structural engineer. You can just design it. If you're trying to create a new building that no one— you have this huge overhang, you're You know, maybe you're trying to do the viewing bridge— not a real bridge, but viewing platform that hangs over the canyon, the Grand Canyon. If you haven't done that before, you probably should have a structural engineer work on that, or several, in order to make sure that it doesn't collapse and kill everyone on it. You want those safety pieces, you want to make sure are done right. done well. And you have— when you need to have those calculations done, that's when you need an engineer. So hopefully this answers the question of when do I need an engineer to develop a product. Hey, thanks for watching. We really appreciate our viewers. And if you haven't subscribed yet, please do subscribe to our channel so you can get more great videos like this in your feed and like the video. If you want to learn more about the Peterman Design Firm, please check us out on our website, firm.com. You'll find link and information in the description. And of course, we're on all social media as well, so check us out there. All right, thank you.
