FoamentingIdeas: The MDI Products Blog

The Slow Death of Product Development...Again?

  

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Michael Cannell at Fast Company wrote a blog on Design's Lost Generation. It was about how many talented designers (architects, product designers and design engineers) were lost to the recession of the early 90's, wondering if the same thing is going to happen because of this recession.

I never really thought about it from that perspective. People lose their jobs in a recession but do they really lose their profession because they just give up? When you give all that time to your education and have to watch your job disappear, with little opportunity to replace it, do you actually give up your dream and move on to another industry? Michael Cannell says that's exactly what happened.

Many of those young designers left the field for good. They took their training and skills and went elsewhere--construction, real-estate development, teaching.

You have to take a deep breath before you wrap your mind around this. It's not just the loss of jobs at the time; it's the loss of talent from a whole industry. What is the net effect of this? What product development projects never came to fruition? What buildings were never built? What industrial design firms failed because it had to let talented people go that might have changed their future? Cannell says:

Over the long run, the design firms probably suffered more than their cast-off staff did. When the economy gained steam a decade later, after the tech crash and 9/11, design firms struggled to find midlevel talent to draft and manage projects. The shortage of experienced hands was one of the factors that led firms to begin outsourcing work to India and Eastern Europe over the last five years or so.

So now not only did architects, industrial designers, and product engineers lose their jobs, the whole country lost their jobs, potentially forever. You can't have a "do-over" on something like this.

Here we are in another recession, where more design talent is being laid-off every day. What affect is this going to have on the future of design? We can only hope, none.