EXPOSED
This is a catch-all bucket — exhibit designers, lighting and set designers, textile and pattern designers, packaging and display designers — and the modal worker spends most hours on screen-based concepting, rendering, layout iteration and spec documentation, all of which generative image and CAD-assist tools now do at usable quality. What holds is the physical half: walking a gallery or trade-show floor, checking sightlines and materials in person, and coordinating fabricators and installers. There is no license, so nothing legally requires a human to sign the design.
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier. Concept sketching, mood boards, colourway variants, CAD elevations and cut-sheet specs — the bulk of billable hours for an exhibit or textile designer — are now produced at usable quality by generative and parametric tools, which is why this sits at 8 rather than mid-teens; what keeps it off the floor is material selection you can only judge by handling a swatch or a laminate sample and fabricator back-and-forth over what can actually be built.
Some physical or field component. An 8 reflects that the physical work is real but episodic: site surveys, sightline checks in a gallery, focusing a lighting rig, mock-up reviews and press-check approvals happen in bursts around a load-in or trade-show install date, while the weeks between are desk-bound — not the daily uncontrolled-site exposure of the trades who execute the drawings.
No licence, no signature requirement. There is no state license or protected title for exhibit, set, textile or packaging design; ADA clearances, egress and fire-rating on a built exhibit get stamped by an architect or licensed engineer, and product safety sign-off lands on the manufacturer, so nothing in the paper trail requires your name.
Some relationship component. An 8 recognises that repeat clients — a museum's exhibits department, a brand's packaging group, a producer who rehires you across shows — hire you partly on the working relationship and your sense of their house style, but the sale is still the portfolio and the deck, and procurement routinely rebids the work or hands your files to a cheaper studio.
Meaningful discretion. You own real calls — how a visitor is routed through an exhibit, whether a fabric repeat reads at production scale, what a lighting cue does to a scene — but those decisions get reviewed by a curator, art director or producer before spend is committed, and a wrong one costs a reprint or a rebuild rather than anyone's safety or a legal exposure, which places it at 9 rather than the mid-teens.
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