Lack of integration between engineering industrial design processes: an analysis based on the historical evolution of professions and tools

Numerous researches provide evidence that Industrial design is key to trigger, foster and sustain innovation and can lead to a measurable performance growth of the business. Nevertheless, their integration with the engineering design process has been difficult since the birth of the profession. The lack of dedicated design tools responding to their specific needs is one of the most important reasons for this stagnation. In this paper we propose an historical and technical approach to trace the evolution of digital design tools. It appears they can be classified inside two archetypal categories. The first one has been designed to address the needs of the engineers such as the reusability of design for manufacturing purposes. The second one was made for graphical artist, for artistic composition or with the capacity to animate and render three-dimensional models. The industrial designer profession use tools with qualities from both categories – neither of which have been designed for her specific needs. We detail the technical reasons for this evolution and we argue it might be possible to solve this issue with a holistic consideration of both approaches.