Hi Fil and David,
I apologise if the word ‘should’ might sound a bit like a personal judgement (which was not), but the point I tried to make was that design engineers (practitioners/researchers) have a range of knowledge and skills inherent of their disciplines (training, research training and experience) that differ from the knowledge and skills of, say, graphic designers. Therefore it is only too natural that they respectively will be more prepared (and feel more comfortable) to do their respective work than people who did not receive that specific training/experience. Of course, there might be design engineers with exceptional natural skills as a graphic designer but that is not the general rule. All This by no means imply that design engineers cannot collaborate with other type of designers, all the opposite, design is multidisciplinary by nature, so they usually have (should) to collaborate with design engineers, and this is usually the case in product development.
But their respective disciplines have specific training, etc. that makes them different among them, although they can also have similarities. To make clear these differences not only have benefits for academic purposes but also for the professional world. i.e.: design engineers designing the casing of a product which might well be designed mainly by industrial designers; and the opposite, industrial designers having to design the functional part of the product which might well be designed mainly by design engineers (although this not so usual due to the type of skills required). Again, these ‘reference boundaries’ do not mean that there should not be open collaboration and discussion among all members of a team/academy involved in product development/research, but that each one should know which part of the design outcome they should be experts in for the benefit of the other members and the final outcome.
I hope this helps,
Jose
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