What promises to be a fascinating discussion about life as an industrial designer is currently taking root on the Core77 Boards. The original poster, presumably a student on the verge of making a crucial decision, started out with a vague (and impossibly broad) query on whether industrial design is a financially lucrative profession. In our members' efforts to answer, the topic is beginning to veer towards the quality of an industrial designer's life.
We would need to identify some parameters in order to ballpark your average ID'er's quality of life. As mentioned before, industrial design is an impossibly broad field, since you can loosely define it as designing anything produced from a factory (and these days, even that is changing). Our readers work everything from plastic widgets to automobiles, appliances to furniture, environments to user interfaces. Some are one-man or -woman studios, others work in consultancies, still others at large corporations.
So what are the commonalities? For one thing, because we often design things that will be produced by machines whose cost far exceeds our own means, we're often at the mercy of others with larger pockets or a firmer hand on the pursestrings. Which is to say, we are not in positions of absolute power, generally speaking. (Kickstarter and low-cost RP are changing this somewhat, but I believe the impact is fractional.)
Secondly, we work in a fairly obscure profession; when a child talks occupations they want to be a firefighter, a doctor or a police officer when they grow up, not the junior designer on staff at a structural package design firm responsible for low-cost cleaning solution bottles targeted at the Latin American market. Because most people don't understand what we do and why it's necessary, there is a degree of skepticism and don't-get-it-ness that the lesser-established among us are used to dealing with, from engineers who don't take our profession seriously to marketers who feel our primary task is to change the CAD model into a color of their choosing. For every famous Behar, Starck and Rashid that have earned the power of sway, there are thousands of us who understand we will continually deal with conflict and opposition. To an industrial designer, it's not a strange sensation to design some cool feature—then instantly start thinking about how you're going to justify and defend it to others involved in the process.
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