Research on the Professional Quality of Product Designers in the Context of the Intelligent Era

With the arrival of the intelligent era, people’s lifestyles, the industry structure and the needs for talents are undergoing major changes. In the face of the large intelligent era coming in torrents, only updating ideas, innovative thinking and self-transcendence can lead the trend. Industry intelligence is breeding a new era, creating difficult and imaginative scientific myths one after another, subverting people’s definitions of many things, and creating an overwhelming amount of new business types, new products and new models. In the context of the intelligent era, what should product designers do to adapt to the development of the times? What professional qualities should they have to reasonably harmonize design and ecology.

In the contemporary design field, plagiarism of designs is a common occurrence, which reflects designers’ lack of subjective consciousness of worldwide subjects such as the demand of the times, the natural ecology, the humanistic care and the sustainable development. Designers are of varying quality, some products’ life cycles are too short, and flawed products are found in the market from time to time. Under the currently mature operating model of the business environment, problems mentioned above should not have occurred. This phenomenon reflects that designers lack attention to a broader scope in the field and are not comprehensively qualified; designers lack a clear design orientation, and the products they design fall short of a good market prospect; designers’ sense of social responsibility and social services is not strong, thus failing to give their product designs any detailed care; and the products designed lack ethical characteristics and local color. In the new era, product designers should have some major qualities as follows: (1) they should give full play to their sensible creative ability and develop their artistic talent; (2) they should seek new development in the multi-dimensional perspective, subject collisions and cross-border experiments; (3) they should design their works on the basis of solving practical problems; (4) they should do a comprehensive research on products from the perspective of the society and services; (5) they should master the ability to harmonize the five major elements, i.e., technology, materials, usage, structure and modeling; (6) they should have a future-oriented (sustainable) learning ability, a comprehensive quality and an innovative design ability; (7) from the design service object, individual per se should be studied rationally and objectively through philosophical theories of anthropology, psychology, phenomenology, etc., and meaningful designs should be made on the basis thereof; (8) they should draw cultural self-confidence, heritage and integration, extension and creation from China’s own traditional arts; and (9) since the large data era required us to solve problems in a more comprehensive, reasonable and accurate manner through resources sharing and joint efforts, it is particularly important to cultivate design teams’ sharing, cooperation and innovative collaboration abilities.