I’ve worn a lot of hats throughout my career: software developer, creative technologist, interaction designer, design researcher, and product designer, all with varying levels of seniority across different companies. But through my most recent job search, something finally clicked. I finally understand why I thrive in research labs, why I do my best work on small teams where I can wear many hats. It’s because I’ve secretly always been a design engineer. I just didn’t have the words for it.
Going back a while, one of the things that drew me to the undergraduate interaction design program at California College of the Arts was the founding chair’s vision: what would it look like to train a software engineer in a design school? That question felt electric to me.
While in the program, I was one of the more technically-minded students, building my own hardware, writing my own code, always reaching for what was possible rather than just what looked good on screen. But upon graduating and looking at interaction design positions, I kept running into the same problem: the industry wanted something different. There was a heavy emphasis on graphic design. Companies wanted interaction designers who were really just visual designers, people who could create pixel-perfect screens with polished user flows, backed by solid research.
And I was good at that work. But part of me always felt incomplete when the emphasis landed so heavily on visual screen design.
So I adapted. I found positions where I could push back on the title or be the more technically minded designer on a team. Sometimes that meant being one of the only designers or one of two, with the other focused on branding and communications. Sometimes it meant being the person in charge of building the prototypes we’d research and test with customers. That let me focus on systems thinking, on the underlying architecture of how things work rather than just how they look.
It worked. But I think what was really happening, all along, is that I was a design engineer who didn’t know it yet. I’m excited to see the roles catching up to reality. What I was trained to do as an interaction designer is now being called design engineering. Meanwhile, the visual design work that dominated those early job postings has found its proper home under UI/UX design. That distinction makes sense to me.
I’ll admit there’s a small sadness in watching “interaction designer” never fully take hold in the industry. But I see now that the work I was trained to do, the work I’ve always been drawn to, has found its name. Interaction designer and design engineer were always the same thing. At least for me, they were.
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