Design Profession: Specialization vs Generalization
Many in-house design firms and consultancies in the industry today adopt different design management styles to survive in the design business, we distinguish mainly two types - design specialization and design generalization.
Design specialization, is a design approach used by firms that have large resources. In these firms, dedicated departments are created for specific talents like 3D, Cad, Sketching, Marketing, and Research. They do not overlap one another. The designers employed in these firms are allocated to where they can best make use of their design capabilities to help to build up the company’s design ability.
While it is good that designers working in such firms become very good at their specific abilities, they face the lack of opportunities to learn other design skills. In the course of only accomplishing a certain area of design over the a long period of time, one may even come to find it monotonous. When one leaves the company, s/he might find it harder to try on new approaches of design. their specific strength may become their weakness to adapt to other approaches of design. Long periods of not practising other design skills may cripple one’s all-round ability. We are curious to find out what type of design practice you prefer…
Design generalization, the latter, is a design approach adopted by firms that are mainly small to medium sized. Within the design department, designers are exposed to different aspects of designs - from sketching to modelling and even managment. For different design projects, designers will have opportunities to take on different roles at different stages - being an entrepreneur, a marketeer, a researcher, a technologist. It enables one to pick up a lot of skills within a short timeframe. Such intense teamwork and varied role playing enables designers to help one another much better. Even as one leaves the company, he is trained to be independent enough to handle more varied design and business situations.
Learning everything in design is indeed a good training ground, but many have often found it very tough to survive through. It is humane in all of us that we designers have something we love and hate to do, something we are good and bad at. If given a task that we like, we will enjoy it. If the task to design is something very difficult or not interesting, it will just make the design process very tough to pull through. Moreover, the skills that we learn within the shorter timeframe may not may not be in-depth enough.
Have you ever wondered which is better? If you are looking for a job right now, which kind of environment would you see yourself working in and why? Where would you like to be in five years from now? And what skills would you like to develop, in-depth or all-round? Give us your thoughts.
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December 18th, 2006 at 0:22
i guess i would see myself working as a design generalization approach. specialization will become boring after time, doing the same stuff all over again. i would rather see myself growing as a multi-talented designer. this way i still have skills to fall back to when a certain position is already filled by a better designer.
in five years i would like to be in a small firm where i can exploit my skills on colaboration with fellow designer of the same mind. preferably a focus on a very wide range of conceptual product designing as well as graphic design, eventually making something out of this company without getting those constraints found in most large companies.
skills to develope would include more development on a personal sketching style and more rendering capabilities. furthermore a focus on fully interactive prototypes for persuasive measures when dealing with conceptual work for other companies. all leading to a professional and perfectionistic set of skills leading hopefully leading to tools for a good designer.
i think that sums it up for now.
December 18th, 2006 at 3:07
I pretty much agree with Jan, I think generalization is the most common of the two, focussing on a couple of key-techniques or skills next to general design skills works best for me.
So it’s more or less the best of both, in a way.
I do see a problem with designers that are to much towards the generalization side, they don’t have specific skills any more, they are only able to do design management and general design work, not specialistic product design.
So I guess it’s the balance between the two that makes a good designer, and depending on the field of design and the type of work, the manager might be more to the generalization side, whereas the design engineer will be more towards the specialization side.
December 18th, 2006 at 12:58
In my opinion design generalization is the way to go. This way everyone can do what he or she is good at, and also learn new things at the same time. A problem arises however when you have only one designer instead of a whole team. Then your job can become hell. What do you guys think?
December 18th, 2006 at 13:40
Definitely generalization… Just think about the inspiration that flows from connecting different views together. It would be a shame to miss out on this opportunity. I think the specialization could be feeded by the educational part in this process. People should be educated on specialization and should work generalization. A lot of specialists would work together to merge their specialties into one generable good new thing.
This specialized education delivers you job opportunities and you receive a lot of experience on the general part. Furhtermore a team is less vurnearble if it is working the generalization way… If one leaves the other could fill the gap in the meanwhile.
December 18th, 2006 at 17:34
Between jobs that offer design specialization and design generalisation, there are actually more jobs that focus on design specialisation in the current market. It seems to benefit the companies better, many of which such companies I read about are companies like Philips, Ideo and Motorola.
But personally, I do agree that a job that offers design specialization is a good platform for new graduates to experience different roles of design within a shorter timeframe. It moulds one’s skllls and personality better. So if you chance upon a job that offers design generalization, grab hold of the opportunity!
In terms of studying design though, I do feel that it is best that at undergraduate level, that a student is exposed to design generalisation first. In that way, one can then discover where his or her true strengths are. This will then help equip to person to know what his or her specialty is at Masters level.
Hence, to me, it is best to try out design generalization first, get the experience, and then go into design specialization to greater hone our skills.
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November 28th, 2007 at 19:30
Hi.
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