Importance of Industrial Design and its collaboration process with Engineering Design

While there are Industrial Design (ID) centric living commodities like home electric appliances in one hand and Engineering Design (ED) centric industrial goods like automotive parts in another, Engineering Designer (EDer) and Industrial Designer (IDer) collaborate in the development process of office equipment such as copier and facsimile that is positioned in between two types of products. Meanwhile, management strategy that put ID in its core is recognized more important lately, as technology and price alone cannot differentiate office products. However extent of contribution of ID to its increased importance in the office equipment is not clarified. The needs to shorten the time to develop a product are increasing, so in order to perform the proper management in the collaboration process between ED and ID, the past process and present statuses are to be analyzed. This research verifies how ID has increased its importance on creating customer values of office equipment by interviews to the designers of ID and ED respectively. And this research also clarifies the extent of contribution of EDer and IDer on creating value of office equipment such as copier, printer and document scanner that requires the collaboration between ID and ED.