Hacking the Physical World: What we taught software designers, and what they're trying to teach us
By Carl Alviani

I attended a conference in the suburbs of Portland last month, hosted jointly by local chapters of the Project Management Forum and the Product Design and Management Association. The topic was collaboration-a broad and encompassing theme that had the effect of attracting a satisfyingly wide cross-section of skilled professionals from across Portland's high-tech industries. And as is becoming more and more the case with such events, there were designers and planners present who work in both the physical and virtual worlds: industrial designers, software developers, project managers who deal with new airplanes and tractor-trailers, and those who deal with Java and Ruby. It makes for interesting conversation usually, but it placed me in an awkward semantic situation I've seen many times before: having to put an untoward amount of energy into convincing people that I design actual things.

I've found over the course of several years, and several conferences and business functions, that if I stop with the first sentence ("I design products."), the next question is often something like "Oh, on what platform?"

The statistical imbalance has something to do with it. Reflecting the apparent ratio in the population at large, there were around three designers of the virtual for every one of the "real" (I put "real" in quotes not out of doubt, but out of deference-software obviously has real use and value, and nothing seems to irritate software developers more than to imply that what they spend 9 to 6 creating isn't an actual product). With the rise of a creative economy comes an emphasis on the ephemeral: applications, interfaces, brands, strategies, code, data; the fraction of commerce that concerns itself with things that can be touched with a finger has shrunk, or fled to less expensive countries. I'm in a minority in these situations, and have resorted to answering the question "So what do you do?" with something blunt and explicit: "I design products. Like, physical objects. That you can pick up with your hands."

Re-Building the Real World It's not a strategy born of indelicacy. I've found over the course of several years, and several conferences and business functions, that if I stop with the first sentence ("I design products."), the next question is often something like "Oh, on what platform?" Distinguishing the design of physical goods from virtual ones is a necessary step, and substituting "consumer goods" doesn't seem to make things any clearer. This isn't a huge problem either, confined as it is to these specific and predictable situations; and designers of the virtual are usually downright charmed to meet someone who does something as quaint as deal with entire atoms, and not just the electrons flowing between them.

It raises a deeply interesting question though: why the confusion in the first place? It's not like...

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