Is AI Coming for Industrial Designers?
Gokul Rajaram recently made a bold claim. By 2026, he argued, AI will eliminate product design as a standalone function within companies. The role, he suggested, will be the first casualty of AI automation in the workplace.
He's not entirely wrong. But he's not talking about industrial design.
Rajaram's argument targets digital product designers — the practitioners who produce UI layouts, screen flows, asset libraries, and interactive prototypes. That work is increasingly automated and the industry knows it. AI tools are already generating wireframes, producing UI variants, and compressing weeks of screen design work into hours. If your value as a designer lives entirely on a screen, the disruption is real and it's already underway.
But industrial design is a fundamentally different discipline. And the distinction matters — particularly for hardware product development, where the physical world introduces complexities no AI tool has yet learned to navigate.
What Industrial Design Actually Is
At Paranormal Design, a Sydney-based industrial design consultancy, we work in the physical world — with materials, manufacturing processes, ergonomics, human behaviour, and production economics. Our job is to understand not just what a product does but how it will be manufactured, how it will feel in someone's hands, and whether the person using it will find it intuitive, efficient, and worth recommending to someone else.
Industrial designers don't just make products look good. That understanding doesn't come from a prompt. It comes from immersion.
We observe how people live. We put prototypes in their hands and watch what happens — not what they say happens, but what their behaviour reveals. We sit with a problem long enough for it to show us dimensions that no brief ever captured. We make serendipitous discoveries that only surface through depth of engagement — the insight about how someone actually holds the product, the manufacturing detail that opens up an unexpected opportunity, the user behaviour that changes everything about how a feature should work.
This is the essence of design for manufacturing — and it is not a process that can be automated. It is the process.
The Shortcut Always Shows
Sure, you can bypass industrial design. Anyone can issue a vague, high level brief to an industrial designer in Sydney or anywhere else and end up with a product on a shelf. It happens every day.
But at what cost?
Good industrial design delivers benefits that are often intangible but immediately felt. Products that are easier and more intuitive to use. An inherent efficiency in the way features and interfaces are laid out. Products that can be repaired and maintained rather than discarded. Details that nobody specified but everyone notices.
Thought, care and attention. You know it when you experience it. And you know its absence just as quickly.
Industrial designers make products that last — products that users love and recommend. That outcome is not accidental. It is the direct result of going deep on the problem rather than skimming the surface of it.
AI can accelerate parts of the hardware product development process. It can help generate concepts faster, model variants more efficiently, and analyse manufacturing options with greater speed. These are genuinely useful tools and industrial designers who embrace them will be more productive for it.
But AI cannot replicate the human judgment that knows which concept is worth pursuing. It cannot observe a user's unconscious hesitation when they pick up a prototype for the first time. It cannot feel the difference between a product that is merely functional and one that is genuinely considered.
Why This Matters Right Now
The companies that understand this distinction will build products that connect with people in ways their competitors cannot replicate — because the depth of thinking that produced them cannot be copied from a brief or generated from a prompt.
The ones that don't will keep wondering why their efficiently produced, cost-optimised products feel like nobody truly thought about the person using them.
AI will replace the industrial designer who doesn't go deep. It won't replace the one who does.
That's not a threat to the profession. It's a clarification of what the profession has always been for.
This post is part of an ongoing series on why depth of engagement in industrial design cannot be automated, outsourced or skipped — and what happens to products when it is.
Danny Cheung is the founder of Paranormal Design, a Sydney-based industrial design consultancy working with hardware founders and civil project architects on hardware product development and design for manufacturing.