Over at SVA's MFA in Products of Design, department chair (and Core77 partner) Allan Chochinov breaks down the contemporary meanings of the job title "Product Designer"—tracing its roots from physical product design to digital product design to a kind of integrative product design.

We know that it's an aggravation for industrial designers to have "lost" the shorthand of "product designer" to the interaction world, but Chochinov addresses this head-on, along with other changes in what someone who calls themselves a "product designer" will be up to in their professional work. Here are a few tasty bites:

On the origin of the term:

Physical product designers typically call themselves "industrial designers." But since it's hard for people to understand what that term means ("You mean you design industries?"), people in this profession took to calling themselves "product designers." Until around 2005, if you introduced yourself at a party as a "product designer," you could describe the kinds of things that you had designed—all belonging to the physical world—and carry on the conversation from there. Often you could be met with a, "So you're a kind of inventor? Who gets paid for it? Wow!"

On losing the title:

Here's the heartbreaker for industrial designers: After the year 2000, with the perfect storm of the internet, the iPhone, and the digitization of absolutely everything, the profession of "interaction design" was born. Everyone wanted a website app or a digital service/platform designed. However, instead of calling themselves "interaction designers" they adopted "digital product designers" because the term "product" is very general but very useful. Everything is a "product of design." Confusing? Yup.

Then, these digital product designers shortened their moniker into, you guessed it, "product designer." Physical product designers still gripe about this, because at a party now, if you told someone you were a "product designer," they would 100 percent assume that you worked in interaction design. Their reply might be "Oh, like Microsoft or Google?" and you would get a little steamed up that your term got co-opted.

On the "Integrative Product Designer":

The modern product designer can be thought of as designing "artifacts in design organization spaces" versus artifacts in physical or digital space. Since the business value of design has now been well established, we've got loads of design happening all over the place. But with all of this design, we have too many teams who speak too many specialized languages—and who practice too many specialized methodologies. Many, literally, cannot talk to each other. To weave all of this design activity together, there's now a consequent need for the parts to be coordinated in deliberate, strategic, and ultimately, wise ways.

On the consequences for, well, any kind of Product Designer:

As you can imagine, balancing the capitalist imperative of supplying the world with a never-ending stream of fresh, new, and novel products collides head-on with working toward a more sustainable world and more equitable distribution and access. This is a total nightmare and something that keeps most (conscientious) industrial designers up at night. And should.

[also:]

As seemingly everything moves from physical experiences to digital ones, many people complain that they are "spending their whole lives on screens" and that they feel more isolated and alienated from the "real world." Throw in the mental health costs of social media, the economic, labor, and civic "disruption" of services like Airbnb, Uber, Amazon, and Facebook, and the polarization and radicalization that takes place through digital "filter bubbles," and you've got some real concerns about the societal impact of putting so much of our lives in the digital world. And speaking of the world, the economic, energy, and carbon impacts of cloud computing and data centers are extreme.

Add AI into the mix—predicted to transform virtually ALL digital systems and services—and you can quickly see runaway consequences in every direction. And, we haven't even talked about bias, equity, digital divides, and the unprecedented concentration of power and wealth in a literal handful of monopolistic mega-platforms.

Oh, and the big one—the unrelenting digital tracking of every click, every face recognition, every purchase, every GPS physical movement…the entire surveillance capitalism industry used to extract value and concentrate wealth and control. (Kinda makes our worries about industrial designers not sleeping at night because of all the plastic they put into the world seem quaint.)

Go ahead and read the whole thing here: What is a Product Designer," Now? And if you're checking out grad schools, Products of Design's application deadline is January 15th. (All info on their apply page.)