Engineers can have taste too...

I feel like an outsider. The industrial design group at Altair is definitely the bastard child of the group. Birthed from the need to document and storyboard the engineers work, we slowly infiltrated the process. To this day we are still considered by many as the "stylists". Just today, in an email I was cced on, an engineer was asked to choose an off-the-shelf part and run it by the "style guys" to make sure it was okay. So I appreciate the thought, but we do a lot more then that. That alone is a subject for a longer conversation but my main point is what happens when we aren't asked to review things. There have been many a times where I have walked up to an engineers desk to see what he/she has been up to and then was brief on alterations to the design they have made. "I thought this looked good so I changed it". That statement makes me cringe. I don't believe they are sabotaging the design on purpose. In the end everyone wants to make a product that looks great. Who am I to tell someone that something that they think looks cool isn't. Okay, okay yes i have been trained at a top industrial design school but one thing I've never forgotten is "beauty is in the eye of the beholder".

So how does a designer overcome such an obstacle? For now I have reached for the only card I have relating to this. I remind them that part of my job is to work on the overall design language. What happens when everyone starts designing individual pieces of one product? Each piece might be cool in its own right but as a whole it starts to look like The Munsters. I don't tell them that they have no clue what looks good and what they have done looks like a dog nert (even though this may be the case sometimes). That would just make them feel like crap and I walk away not knowing if he will ever ask my advice again. By telling him about the overall design language the engineer doesn't feel like you are a pompous designer who thinks that your shit don't stink. He understands that even though this small addition might be what he wants it may not be whats best for the overall product. If any one has any better ideas on how to go about this problem please let me know. Until then, I will most likely stick with this.