EXPOSED
The front half of this job — concept sketching, mood boards, form exploration, rendering, and spec-sheet writing — is exactly what image and text models now do in minutes, and clients have noticed. What holds is the back half: physically handling prototypes, tuning ergonomics and material feel, negotiating design-for-manufacture constraints with tooling engineers, and owning the call on which concept ships. Most industrial designers at the national median spend a large share of their week on the automatable front half, which is why this lands mid-EXPOSED rather than safe.
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier. An 8 reflects that ideation sketches, keyshot/renders, packaging graphics, and CAD surface variants — historically a third to half of billable hours — can now be generated or iterated by prompt, while GD&T-tolerance drawings, draft-angle and undercut fixes for injection molds, and hand-tuning grip geometry off a printed part still need you at the bench, so it sits at the boundary rather than in the mixed-safe teens.
Some physical or field component. A 9 is earned by the SLA/FDM print queue, foam and clay models, calipers on competitor teardowns, and press-side visits during first-article runs — real physical work, but conducted in your own shop and the supplier's clean factory floor rather than in uncontrolled field conditions, which is what keeps it under 13.
No licence, no signature requirement. There is no state licence for industrial design and IDSA membership carries no legal weight — when a handle cracks or a housing traps a finger, the PE who signed the structural analysis and the manufacturer's product-safety group absorb the claim, not you, hence a 2 rather than zero only because your name is on the design record.
Some relationship component. A 9 covers the in-house designer whose credibility with the VP of product and the tooling vendor took years to build and doesn't transfer, but the deliverable itself — a STEP file and a spec sheet — ships and functions with no reference to who made it, unlike a brand consultant whose relationship is the invoice.
Meaningful discretion. An 11 fits owning genuinely contested calls — which of five concepts survives DFM review, whether to eat $40k in tooling change for a 2mm radius, where the cost/ergonomics line falls — while the decisions that carry real consequence downstream get ratified by product management, engineering sign-off, and safety review before anything cuts steel.
Civil Engineers EXPOSED
Has AI actually changed your work?