Biting

I’ve been thinking about certain things lately. For one, I feel rather detached from the world around me. As a person, nothing agitates me more than not understanding certain aspect of this life I’m living. Do you know anything? More specifically, do I know anything?

Do you know what the job of an industrial designer is? It’s basically to take an object and make it pretty, to make it marketable, to make it comfortable to use. That’s it. Industrial designers traditionally don’t deal with bosses, crowns, chamfers, and parts tolerances. Those are jobs for design engineers. No one told me this. I mean sure, it’s nice to understand those things to make communication with engineers easier, but that’s not the most important thing for an industrial designer. I thought designers do pretty much everything from conceptualization all the way to finishing a product. But apparently not. In fact, there’s no way an industrial designer can also be a full fledged design engineer. That in itself is another bachelor’s degree — another 4 years in college. There’s no way an industrial designer can hope to be a design engineer as good as a design engineer who studied 4 years as a design engineer. There’s no way.

All these years, I’ve been doing something that wasn’t really expected of me. How much time would I have saved if I didn’t think about manufacturability from the beginning? How much better designs could I have produced if I didn’t shut it down from the get go due to cost restriction and manufacturing feasibility?

I bit off more than I could chew.

I bit off more than I could chew. This is a problem many creatives must have faced. Challenging themselves, but ending up throwing themselves into a deep hole simply because they misjudged their abilities.

“I can do that, no problem.”
to
“That assignment? Easy. Add it to my list.”
then finally
“3 projects at once? I’m game.”

But those are words of a crazy person. I should’ve realized that I’m no genius. I’m a run-of-the-mill designer that can only concentrate on one or two projects max. I’m no Karim Rashid with a team of dog-tailed bright-eyed interns and designers willing to bring hundreds of designs to fruit. No way. I’m just a single person. I don’t even have a proper shop equipment or any tools.

There is a limit to what I can do.

If I bit off more than I can chew, I just need to spit out everything, and properly cut out the hard inedible parts and eat the soft nutritious parts. It’s that simple.