INDUSTRIAL DESIGN: do you design for a living, or is it who you are?

Ask someone who used to work in logistics what they do and they will tell you what they do now. Ask an industrial designer who got laid off six months ago what they do and they will tell you they are an industrial designer. Not were, are.

It’s very difficult to find a former industrial designer. I have met industrial designers between jobs, consulting on the side, who took a detour into project management or sales or product ops to pay the bills. But every single one of them still tries to own the title somehow. Not as nostalgia, as identity.

I do not think this is arrogance. I think it is something that got built in much earlier than any of us realize.

Most of us were told we were creative before we knew what to do with it - a teacher, a parent, someone. You were the kid who drew things, made things, saw things differently and could not stop making that visible. That got noticed and named early, before a lot of other things about you were. So it stuck. It became part of the story you told about yourself.

Then at some point, usually teens or early twenties, we found industrial design. And for a lot of us it did not feel like a discovery. It felt like a confirmation. We were not introduced to a field. We were handed a label for something we already knew was true about ourselves.

That is a completely different relationship to a profession than most people have. A data analyst learned a skill. A supply chain manager mastered a system. Those are real, valuable, hard things. But they are external competencies that got developed. What most industrial designers found was not a competency. It was a category that finally fit the identity they had been carrying around since childhood.

So when the job disappears, the identity does not. Because the job was never the source of it. The job was just the place where it got expressed.

I think this is also why industrial designers are so hard to manage, so resistant to being told what to make, and so genuinely devastated when a product they fought for gets compromised into something unrecognizable. It is not stubbornness. It is that the work is not separate from the self in the way it might be for someone who can leave what they do at the office.

The creative was always there. Industrial design just gave it a name, a set of tools, and direction to point it towards.

Making ideas reality.