Environmental Factors That Influence Product Design

Industrial design is an important and integrated profession. Its area covers a wide range of specialties such as engineering, business, ergonomics and aesthetics. Fur-thermore, it includes social, environmental, and cultural issues (Giard, 2000; IDSA, 2003). Product designers focus on people’s needs and on how to create safe and usable products that can be adjusted to the varying lifestyles of people. Thus, product designers or industrial designers, emphasize on the way in which people live, deal with concept, appearance, performance and human factors that play a key role to influence design. On the other hand, engineers, focus on details, func-tionality, performance and production, and tend to concentrate more on the prob-lems of making a product function better for the tasks it is designed to do while op-timizing its design for production (Owen 2004). The field of industrial design optimizes function, value, and appearance of products and systems for the mutual benefit of users and

The work of Yea (2003) focused on Taiwan where as the work of Yang et al. (2004) focused on Chinese job markets. The study conducted by Ramirez (2012) focused on employability factors for in-dustrial design graduates and focused on US job markets. Those studies figured out the key competencies required for industrial design jobs however, none of those studies focused on the proficiency and required level for industrial design jobs. It is very important to achieve certain level of proficiency in certain areas. The study reported in our paper investigates the level of proficiency required for industrial designers as sought in job advertisements. This study aims to understand the vari-ous job titles currently adopted in the industrial design profession in Australia and help design educators to guide industrial design students to plan their careers