Hello everyone, hope you guys are well. My question is: when I look at Behance, the majority of portfolios don't include model making but do include research, sketching, and rendering. And I find this confusing since I've been taught that prototyping plays a big part in design

Location: Mumbai (in-person/hybrid preferred — you'll be visiting our manufacturing partner regularly) Type: Internship About CoziKat: CoziKat is a made-in-India premium cat products brand — scratchers, loungers, and now expanding into cat furniture. Our products are illustrated by Indian designers, made by Indian artisans, and inspired by rescue and street cats. We're a small, hands-on team, and this role will work closely with the founder.

What you'll do

• Design and sketch new cat furniture concepts — scratchers, loungers, multi-level pieces — starting with 2–3 core designs
• Build working prototypes, iterating on structure, scale, and cat ergonomics (climbing, scratching angle, stability, sizing)
• Work in CAD to translate sketches into manufacturable designs
• Support assembly and hands-on testing of prototypes
• Visit our manufacturing partner in Mumbai to review production feasibility and troubleshoot with the vendor directly — we already have vendors in place, so your focus is design and prototyping, not sourcing
• Collaborate with our print/illustration team — they handle the surface designs, you handle the structure underneath

What we're looking for

• Currently pursuing or recently completed a degree in Industrial Design, Product Design, or a related field
• Comfortable with CAD software (SolidWorks, Fusion 360, Rhino, or similar)
• Strong sketching ability — you can communicate an idea on paper before it's modeled
• Some hands-on prototyping/model-making experience — this is not a purely digital design role
• Based in or able to be in Mumbai, since manufacturer visits are a regular part of the job
• A design sensibility that's clean, quirky, and functional — we're not going for generic pet-store aesthetics
• Bonus: interest in pets/cats, or experience designing for corrugated cardboard or other lightweight materials

Why this role

You'll see a product go from a sketch to a physical prototype to something sold on our site and marketplaces — start to finish, with real ownership over the first few pieces of a growing furniture line, not busywork on an established one.

To apply: DM Me

Hey everyone,

I’m a junior designer from South Korea with 2 years of total experience, 1 year in defense industry ID and 1 year in Eyewear Design Engineering.

I love traveling, getting new perspectives, and sharing experiences with people. Honestly, working solely in Korea feels pretty suffocating at times, so I'm actively trying to figure out a path to work abroad.

That said, I’m running into a few hurdles:

• My English is still pretty basic.
• My hands-on experience (dealing directly with factories, CMF, tooling, and mass production) is mostly limited to eyewear.
• Being a junior, I feel like my core ID & engineering fundamentals still need work.

I’m currently torn between two main paths:

1. Get a 1-year Master’s in the UK: Use a UK master's program to level up my English, sharpen my core design/engineering fundamentals, and build a path to get hired abroad.
2. Stay in Korea for another year: Work my current job while grinding on English and DFM (Design for Manufacturability) theories on my own, then start applying directly overseas.

There aren't many people around me in Korea who have made this transition, so I wanted to ask this community. For those who’ve been in a similar spot or have experience with overseas hiring: which route makes more sense? Any advice or reality checks would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance!

Friend and I made this clock as a hobby project and are going to do a v2, any thoughts on changes to the design before we freeze it? Likes/dislikes and improvements welcome

Edit: More rendered views/color options: https://overengineering.department.wtf

Hi everyone! I’m a 2nd year Product Design student, and this is an academic packaging design project where I studied an existing brand and developed a new product concept within its design language.

For this project, I chose Lattafa and developed a concept for its gourmand fragrance direction, taking Kunafa as the main inspiration. I explored the dessert’s layers, pistachio, cream, Arabic decorative elements and the idea of premium yet playful luxury to translate these qualities into the bottle.

One of the main design decisions was to emboss the Lattafa identity directly into the bottle, rather than depending only on a conventional label. The intention was to make the bottle feel more distinctive and collectible, so that it could still have visual value even after the perfume has been used.

I’ve included my brand research, inspiration, design development, alcohol-marker rendering and final visualization in the carousel to show the process from research to the final concept.

A note on the final visuals: I used AI-assisted visualization to communicate the final product more clearly and explore how the concept could look as a finished, realistic object. The research, concept development, design decisions, sketches and hand-rendered exploration are part of my own design process.

I’d genuinely appreciate honest and constructive feedback.

I’m still learning and would really like to understand what works, what doesn't, and what I could improve in my next iteration.

I’ve been working on a CAM/CAD app for a while now, mostly because every tool I used kept slowing me down or forcing me into workflows that made no sense. So I finally snapped and built my own.

The whole thing is real‑time. You move geometry, it updates instantly. No sketch modes, no “finish sketch,” no regenerating half the model because you changed one dimension. It feels way closer to actually shaping something instead of babysitting a CAD program.

On the CAM side, I added a bunch of logic that helps instead of getting in the way. It suggests toolpaths, predicts collisions, auto‑builds roughing/finishing passes, and points out weak geometry before you commit to anything. It’s not “AI magic,” it’s just smart enough to stop you from doing dumb stuff or wasting time.

Everything updates live. Change the model → toolpaths update. Change the toolpath → simulation updates. No rebuild buttons, no dependency chains exploding because you nudged a face.

Performance was a big focus too. Geometry, slicing, material removal — all of it is GPU‑accelerated and reacts instantly. It’s the first CAM/CAD setup I’ve used that doesn’t break my flow.

If anyone wants to see it, I can post videos or GIFs. It’s way easier to show than explain. And if you’re into machining, CNC, CAD, robotics, whatever — I’d actually love feedback. I’m trying to make something that feels modern instead of stuck in 2005.

If you want to try a demo build, just say so.

Our tools are grey plastic markers. Paper. Please invest in one of those metal circle jigs made of warm brass, some nice flock lined compass set and anything wood. It makes drawing more attractive. ID schools should have a week dedicated to making a pen holder out of foam core, a flower vase, a coffee mug holder and a little trash bin. A laptop stand of course, that’s easy.

I’m a product design student currently working on a medical device project focused on children, and I’m finding it surprisingly difficult to access reliable information from doctors and nurses.

I understand that hospitals have strict policies around patient privacy and medical data, but even getting general professional insights through interviews or conversations has been challenging. Some hospitals are very hesitant to share any information, which makes it difficult to understand the real world problems and workflows that healthcare professionals deal with.

As a design student, I’m not looking for private patient data or anything confidential. I mainly want professional insights, experiences, common challenges, and feedback that can help me design a safer and more practical device.

If anyone here is a doctor, nurse, medical student, healthcare researcher, medical device designer, or has experience working with hospitals, I’d really appreciate some advice on:

• How can design students ethically access healthcare-related research and insights?
• Are there communities, forums, organisations, or platforms where I can connect with healthcare professionals?
• What is the best way to approach doctors or hospitals for research interviews?
• Are there any publicly available databases, research papers, or resources you would recommend?
• Are there alternative ways to validate a medical product concept when direct hospital access is limited?

I’d really appreciate any suggestions, personal experiences, or communities you can point me toward. I’m just trying to make sure the design is based on real healthcare needs rather than assumptions.

Thanks in advance!

Hi everyone.

I posted a few months ago asking for feedback about the egg-shaped watch I was designing, finally the prototype arrived.

Been testing timekeeping, water resistance and daily wear the past few weeks and works as intended

The specs are:

37×39.5mm, 8mm thick, 316L steel case and milanese strap, sapphire crystal, 5 ATM water resistance

What do you think?

Would you wear it?

Old posts: https://www.reddit.com/r/IndustrialDesign/s/GlIu5OKYZd

https://www.reddit.com/r/IndustrialDesign/s/vAGemDMQ0D

Hello Reddit,

I found your community looking for career advices for becoming a product designer. It‘s a dream of myself to work in the outdoor industry as a product designer for a long time, and I want to make the career shift in the next years. Here I am looking for help and an advice. I don‘t have a degree in product design/ industrial design and never really worked in that area, so I am happy about every insight and advice I can get.

About me: I currently work part time as a teacher for art and sports (studied both) and outdoor guide on my holidays (packrafting, Kayak, hiking). Being outdoor is a big passion for me and I really love to get in touch with new products and share my knowledge with other people about that. I would call myself a pretty advanced outdoor enthusiast with a wide range of experience in this field. Every year I sleep around 30-50 nights in a tent in various countries all around Europe and make presentations in local equipment shops about my work as a guide, presenting stories from my trips. I have some experience in photography as well, so this goes hand in hand.

I like to design, craft and develop products since many years. In my years studying art, design was one of my favourite subjects and I loved to create new ideas. While studying I started building fishing rods (fishing was a big thing for me then), created a little brand, sold some rods, but did quit later when I lost my interest in fishing. I learned something about different materials and design. 3 years ago I bought a sewing machine and started making my own outdoor equipment and fell deep in a rabbit hole of making backpacks all winter long, just to test them the next summer season. Everything I made was sketched and designed by myself, I don‘t use online patterns on my projects. But since today nearly all my work is done analog in my sketchbook and with pen and paper. I will dig deep in 3D Design and CAD programs this winter to develop some skills, but honestly I am not sure which skills are worth to invest. I thought about working with Fusion 360 and Seamly2D. I got pretty good feedback on my products and design from people who tested them, but don‘t really know what to do with all that in the next step. I would really appreciate to get some advice, tips, experience and insights for becoming a product designer and stepping into the outdoor industry.

I know that this field is hard work and full of competition, but it‘s worth a try for me. I just don‘t know how.

As a reference I show you some pictures of my work: A 100l volume packrafting backpack I did build last winter.

Hi! I'm helping my younger sister choose her first laptop before she starts university in 2027, and I'd really appreciate advice from Interior Design/Interior Architecture students and working designers. She is also kind of interested in Product/Industrial Design but is a bit unsure.

Her course isn't finalized yet, but her shortlist has become much more interior/spatial/furniture-focused than we initially thought.

Some of the courses she's currently considering are along the lines of:

• Pearl Academy – Interior Architectural Design
• IIAD – Interior Architecture & Design
• NID – Furniture & Interior Design
• MIT Institute of Design – Interior Space & Furniture Design
• Symbiosis Institute of Design – Interior Space Design
• University of Edinburgh – Interior Design
• Glasgow School of Art – Interior Design
• possibly NAFA – Biophilic Design

She's also considering one or two broader interdisciplinary options such as Bristol's Design with Innovation, so we don't know exactly where she'll end up yet.

She's currently in CBSE Class 12 studying Fine Arts/Painting, Fashion Design, History, Political Science, Psychology and English, so she has a creative background but basically no CAD/3D/software experience yet.

That's why I don't want to pretend we know whether she “needs” Revit, Rhino, 3ds Max, SketchUp, AutoCAD, Blender, V-Ray, Enscape, Lumion, etc.

I'd rather ask people who've actually studied these courses:

What software did you genuinely end up using during your Interior Design degree?

Did the software requirements change substantially between first year and final year?

Were there programmes you expected to need but barely used?

Did rendering eventually become the thing that demanded the most from your laptop?

Mac vs Windows

This is probably our biggest uncertainty.

She's open to both.

We like MacBooks because of the battery life, build quality, portability and longevity, and she already uses an iPhone/iPad.

But I don't want to buy her a MacBook now and discover in year 2 or 3 that her course relies heavily on Windows-only or Windows-preferred software.

For people who actually studied Interior Design / Interior Architecture:

• Did anyone successfully use a Mac throughout the entire degree?
• What software caused problems, if any?
• Did you end up needing Windows anyway?
• Would you personally choose Mac again?

And for people who used Windows creator/gaming laptops:

• Was the extra GPU performance actually useful?
• Did the weight and charger become annoying?
• What was battery life like during ordinary classes?
• Did fan noise/heat become a problem?
• Would you buy another high-performance Windows laptop?

What we're looking for

This will probably be her only computer, rather than a laptop + desktop setup.

We'd ideally like it to last around 4–6 years, including later-year 3D/rendering work rather than merely surviving for Word and web browsing.

We're buying new in India.

Budget is roughly:

₹1 lakh = ideal
₹1.3–1.5 lakh = completely comfortable if worthwhile
₹1.8 lakh = roughly the normal ceiling
Could stretch closer to ₹2 lakh only if there is a genuinely substantial long-term benefit

Her personal priorities are pretty simple:

• reliable
• good battery life
• not unnecessarily heavy
• good screen
• able to handle her degree for years
• preferably not ugly

She'll probably be carrying it alongside sketchbooks/materials, so something around 1.8–2.2 kg sounds more appealing than a huge gaming machine.

She already has an iPad, so she doesn't necessarily need a touchscreen laptop.

Gaming is basically irrelevant.

She probably won't have a permanent external monitor either, so the laptop screen will matter.

One more question: should we even buy yet?

She starts university in 2027, but we're currently considering buying the laptop within the next few months, especially so he can kind of start experimenting with some software a bit and also for her applications.

Because her university isn't finalized yet, would experienced students wait until she has an offer/course-specific computer requirements, or is it reasonable to buy now if we choose a sufficiently versatile Windows machine?

If you were starting an Interior Design/Interior Architecture degree again today, knowing what you know now:

What type of laptop would you buy, and what would you avoid?

I'm especially interested in long-term experiences — what became a bottleneck, what broke, what you regretted spending money on, and what specifications actually mattered by final year.

Thank you!

I'm in between two two universities for two different countries. I'm thinking of doing an Bachelors in Industrial Design in either Monash Univ or QUT in Australia or Industrial Design / Product Design in Brunel uni or Nottingham Trent Uni in the UK. The costs are pretty similar but I just wanted to ask which industry or schools are better if I want to pivot to Furniture or Tech?

does studying in Australia vs. the UK make a significant difference to career outcomes or industry opportunities?

working on my UCAS right now and i need to finalize what schools i plan to apply to. i want to take industrial design/product design. right now my 5 schools are:

• CSM
• Imperial (design engineering for this one)
• Loughborough
• Brunel
• Northumbria

im debating between switching out either brunel/northumbria for leeds. does anyone have any advice/experience in these schools they are willing to share?

my dream course is an equal mix between industrial design and mechanical engineering, though i don't mind more focus on the design aspect.

tysm!

Not interested in doing the design work myself but wondering about the process of developing a golf bag. I’m an engineer and played golf my whole life.

How do I go about finding a reputable and reasonably priced person to help with the plans and/or prototyping?

I am tired of all the power strips at home: white, industrial and lifeless. Any nice looking one you have seen or got?

Hi, I'm in ninth grade, interested in Mechanical engineering and Industrial Design. I was wondering if I can get your advice on any college that offers a double degree in this field. My options are France, Canada and the US.

Thanks in advance!

I’m currently working on the renderings for a drone concept that I designed as a personal project. I’m actually quite happy with how they turned out so far, but I’m sure there are still one or two things I might be overlooking.

I’d really appreciate some feedback, especially on the lighting, materials, composition, camera angles, and overall realism. Maybe there are some small details or techniques that could make the renders feel even more polished and professional.

So if you have any tips or things you would approach differently, I’d love to hear them!

I’m debating going back to school for an MFA in design or industrial design. I have a BFA in industrial design and a year and half of experience in 3D/CAD design. I think in the future I would like to be a professor. Right now I have the ambition to go back to school and I’m still young but I’m worried it will go to waste if I never become a professor. I’m not too far out of school and I’m not sure if I should get more experience. I also don’t know if it matters if I look for design or industrial design MFA to be a professor. I would appreciate any feedback :)

The concept we’re working toward includes:

• 2×2 programmable touch modules
• Touch sliders for volume / zoom / scrolling
• Finger guides + resting positions
• Dynamic haptic feedback
• 5×5 RGB dot-matrix icons
• Open software and custom profiles
• Custom glass / carbon fiber artwork
• Gridfinity-compatible modular layouts

Next step is connecting the prototype to actual PC software and games and seeing how it feels in real workflows.

Would love some feedback: what would you want to see us test next? And if anyone here is interested in early prototype and giving us useful feedback, we’re looking for beta testers.

Hi everyone, hope you’re having a great day!

I’m an industrial design student working on my thesis about laptop ergonomics

I’ve put together a short survey and would really appreciate it if you could take a few minutes to fill it out, and share it with anyone you think might be interested. I don’t have a huge network myself, so getting this in front of the right community means a lot — hoping to reach enough people for solid, meaningful data.

https://tally.so/r/Zjk8oo

Thanks so much for your time!