The great divide is still there

I recently have had a lot of meetings with vendors and engineers trying to get our designs realized. Each time after the different meetings, I noticed that there is still a great divide between the workings of engineers and designers. It’s really not about the ability in speaking each other’s language or terminology but about a whole mindset and approach to product development.

This is interesting in particular as there is a lot of talk and concern about outsourcing strategies and contract manufacturers moving up the food chain to providing value-added services like design or mechanical design. If you ask me, I will boldly state that contract manufacturers (CM) will never be able to provide upstream industrial design services. Simply because the people running CMs are not designers.

This dawned on me after a meeting with what we thought we a designer’s dream CM. This was not the first time we met up with them, but from the beginning, they sold us that they were different from the run-of-the-mill CM. They claimed they were customer oriented, flexible, provide design advice, and best of all able to build anything we wanted. They kept on insisting that the PCB and components were not important, as they would build the PCB (printed circuit board) to fit the shape of our unique designs. Finally, they sealed the discussion by mentioning that they wanted to focus on and worked with brands to develop intellectual property. What a great marketing story.I had thought WOW this is amazing. Imaging the ability to build a design with no internal constraints? Possible? I did not think so. From my experience, operating completely without mechanical constraints is as likely as snow in Singapore. Anyways we went along with them.

We refined our designs to meet our best-case scenarios. But it went rapidly downhill after that. After studying our designs. They kept on insisting that our design would not work because the design’s size could not fit the components they wanted to use. We were like this is not right, not when they did not provide us with component layouts in the first place! What about building things to fit our unique designs?
We countered what they said. We told them that we are not engineers and we needed their help to advise us, as promised, what components could fit in the product, and as part of the design refinement for engineering, we would modify the designs accordingly. But they insisted that reiterations were not efficient as we should have figured out the shape in the first place. Furthermore, they kept on talking about the same things over and over again, in particular asking us about detailed specifications when we relied on them for recommendations.

In the end, I gave up and asked them bluntly what did they need to do the work? They replied with a completed design with details specifications and a budget! I was shocked. Their definition of “flexible” was doing exactly what we want and operating within our requirements. We needed to give them concrete limits. We had thought to work with them on a collaboration level to create a working specification and towards a draft budget they wanted! To cut the long story short, I told them if they want to support the development of intellectual property they better get used to iterations! I also decided at that point was the people to talk to the CM should be the R&D engineers, not the designers.

Anyways the takeaway from this is that when designers develop products it’s about dealing with unknowns, making reiterations and changes until the right solutions are found. This almost involves thinking, trying, and exploring. Each time try again when a mistake is made. Engineers on the other hand, as the CM told us are practical people. Details orientated, focused, and need to work within limits. Their objective is to get to the solution as quickly and efficiently as possible. Making mistakes is not an option.

It was a tiring process, but I’ve lean for one thing engineers will be engineers and designers will be designers. Not that there is anything wrong with it, but I hope we can all learn from this pain. Including myself.