I had a bad interview today.
Not because I didn't know my work.
Not because I couldn't design.
But because I wasn't prepared.
I stumbled over my words. I searched through folders trying to find files I should have had ready. I hadn't researched the company deeply enough to understand what they were really looking for.
For a while, I thought that was the lesson.
It wasn't.
The moment that stayed with me happened much later in the conversation.
I was talking about prototyping, manufacturing, engineering decisions and how I like understanding the internals of a product.
The interviewer stopped me and asked,
"Isn't that the job of a mechanical engineer? As a designer, how are you contributing?"
I didn't have a good answer.
I kept replaying that question in my head.
Maybe because I wasn't sure if I had been chasing something that doesn't exist.
I don't see myself becoming a pure industrial designer.
I don't see myself becoming a pure mechanical engineer either.
What fascinates me is the space between them.
I've always been more interested in understanding why a product takes the shape it does than simply deciding what it should look like.
I don't usually design the shell first.
The shell evolves from everything happening inside.
The battery changes the proportions.
The PCB changes the layout.
The manufacturing process changes the geometry.
The mechanism changes the interaction.
Only then does the product begin to look like itself.
Maybe that's why I often struggle to explain what kind of designer I am.
Because most interviews seem to assume that industrial design and mechanical engineering are two separate worlds.
I've never really seen them that way.
I admire people like James Dyson not because they blurred the line between design and engineering, but because they never seemed to believe there was a line in the first place.
The more I thought about the interview, the more I realized the interviewer wasn't wrong.
It is the job of a mechanical engineer to solve engineering problems.
But perhaps it's the job of an industrial designer to decide which engineering problems are worth solving, and how those decisions influence the product people eventually hold in their hands.
Understanding manufacturing doesn't make me a mechanical engineer.
Understanding mechanisms doesn't either.
What matters is why I care about them.
I don't care about manufacturing because I want to optimize a production line.
I care because manufacturing changes the design.
I don't care about mechanisms because I want to calculate stresses all day.
I care because mechanisms change how people interact with a product.
Engineering, for me, has never been the destination.
It's always been another design material.
The interview also taught me something else.
I thought I had done my research.
I knew the company's products.
I knew their collaborations.
But I didn't know how they thought internally.
I didn't know what kind of designer they were looking for.
Those are completely different things.
Research isn't memorizing product launches.
It's understanding what a company values.
Only then can you decide whether you're trying to become the person they're looking for.
Or whether they're the company you're looking for.
That might have been the biggest realization of the day.
I've spent so much time hoping companies choose me that I forgot I should be choosing them too.
I've realized I don't just want a job in industrial design.
I want to work where innovation is the first word in every conversation.
Where engineering, design, prototyping and manufacturing shape each other from the very beginning.
Where curiosity matters as much as aesthetics.
Where solving difficult problems is part of the culture, not an exception.
Maybe that's a smaller group of companies.
Maybe it's a harder path.
But after today's interview, I know it's the one I want to follow.
The interview didn't answer whether I'm good enough.
It answered something far more important.
It reminded me what kind of designer I'm trying to become.