Design/Engineer

• Design Engineer

  • Overview

    • A design engineer is a Design/er who engages with the engineering, or an engineer with design craft: a person who decides how a piece of software should work, look and feel and can build it. The practice and its history are on Design/Engineer/ing.
    • Person/Maggie Appleton describes the role as a designer who engages in the engineering and understands how the product works (Person/Gergely Orosz/Pod/26/09 Design Engineering with Maggie Appleton). In her written definition, a design engineer sits at the intersection of design and engineering and works to bridge the gap between them[1].

  • Context

    • Compared with a designer

      • A designer hands visuals, prototypes and specifications to engineers. A design engineer also writes the front-end code, so one or two artifacts replace many, and the design accounts for the medium's constraints[1].

    • Compared with a front-end engineer

      • A front-end engineer is judged on implementation. A design engineer is judged on the design decisions as well, and usually works in live code and Prototypes rather than static mock-ups such as those made in Figma.
      • Appleton says design engineers often write the front-end themselves while engineers handle synchronization, data flow and backend logic (Person/Gergely Orosz/Pod/26/09 Design Engineering with Maggie Appleton).

    • Neighboring titles

      • UX engineer, UI engineer, interface designer, interaction designer and front-of-the-front-end engineer overlap with it, and their meanings differ by company[1].

  • Key sources

    • Natalya Shelburne gave the first talks on the role in 2019 and co-wrote the 2020 Design Engineer Handbook; David Luhr traces the term's spread from there[2].
    • Trys Mudford, quoted by Luhr: the name "Design Engineer" is "entirely focused on the handshake between those two other roles"[2].

  • Footnotes

    • [1] https://maggieappleton.com/design-engineers

    • [2] https://luhr.co/blog/2024/02/26/the-origins-of-design-engineering/