The purpose of this study is to draw core competencies of product designers for changes in industrial and social demands for the designs and suggest long-term product designer training plans. The followings show a long-term training prospect of the de...
The purpose of this study is to draw core competencies of product designers for changes in industrial and social demands for the designs and suggest long-term product designer training plans. The followings show a long-term training prospect of the designers for the changes in the future design industry. Firstly, due to the expansion of scope of business process participation and importance of designers, participation of designers is increased at the whole steps from product development to advertising and marketing during new products development, and this plays a significant role in corporate’ sales increase as well.
Secondly, considering changes in industry and technology and design role, convergence design personnel, design personnel who will lead the industry and professionals of design adjacency/applications sector would be a main design personnel who will be required in the future society. At this point, studying for long-term training plans for product designers based on systematic understanding of product designers through product designers’ job analysis is an important research topic. This study will be a base for education policies in order to conduct professional designers training and refresher training to meet the market’s demands.
Literature search for design concepts and industry change and job analysis for the changes of the future society and industry was used as a study method. A job analysis of product designers was conducted by a council of experts. Finally, based on this research, a direction for product designers for the changes of future design industry was suggested. The followings are the results of this study.
Firstly, as a result of analyzing design jobs with literature search and a council of experts, a product designer has 6 responsibilities, design research, establishment of design concept, design concept visualization, cooperation, mass products management and self-development, and has 64 tasks based on these responsibilities. And it was found out that they need to know 14 functions to perform those responsibilities.
Secondly, tasks for each responsibility of product designers requires knowledge and skills; for knowledge ‘documentation of the established data’ and ‘communication skills’, and for function ‘related software use’ and ‘information coordination/classification and documentation’ are mainly required. This shows a distance from creative design works that many designers thought important. This is because that shows higher frequency of tasks while performing their jobs in a corporate rather than showing the tasks of order of importance. However, considering many designers focus on design development during the design training from higher education, this part shall not be ignored either.
Thirdly, 4 competencies for the job model derived from this study are drawn. Firstly, emotions competencies that understand emotions of the users and identify the clients’ needs with their information, secondly, creativity competencies to draw and actualize creative design concepts and thirdly, communication competencies that visualize and communicate with design concepts using sketches and design tools are required. Finally, base knowledge competencies that contribute to the better results of a corporate through internal and external cooperation are required.
Fourthly, a product designer needs to play firstly an integrative role that improves human being’s value of life from the styling perspective for decorating the past’s appearances beautifully for the changes in the future design industry. And from a corporate point of view, product designs shall expand the added value of the products and establish business models, and from a public point of view, product designs shall activate the national economy. Secondly, it is evident that use of UI, UX designs became prominent due to the generalization of digital composite products, and product designers will still play a significant role in integrated NI (Network Identity). For this reason, product designers should control related design sector and expand the values of it. Thirdly, product designers should obtain comprehensive understanding of not only expert knowledge for the designs, but also knowledge for marketing, management and technology to follow the changes in the future design industry.
Consequently, this study analyzed product designers’ jobs, classified knowledge and skills to perform their tasks for given jobs and investigated current product designers’ jobs. And by reviewing literature, changes in jobs of product designers according to the changes in the future design industry were anticipated. The results of this study will be applied for the future in-depth study for design jobs by investigating product designers’ jobs and suggesting changes for the future. Furthermore, this will be a base for education policies for professional designers training and refresher training in line with market’s demand forecast.