Joe Delman, in his article “Cost vs. Quality: The Dangers of Outsourcing Design Overseas”, points to an new outsourcing practice, which goes beyond relocating manufacturing or customer service processes to countries like China or India. His concern is that growing number of American companies are seen choosing to off-shore some of their product development processes, particularly product design, to Chinese contractors.

The author does not deny China its manufacturing prowess – he states now an obvious fact, that our houses, roads and cities are overflowing with products produced and assembled in China. For a moment he leaves us with hope that at least innovative thinking and product design is still an American domain. But the Chinese machine has switched gears recently, producing thousands of graduates of design schools, complementing their low-cost precision labor with added value human resource standing by and ready. 

However, Joe Delman cautions about dipping into that pool too quickly. He notes that cultural characteristics of Chinese and Indian designers may stand in a way of unstoppable innovation, creative flow. He goes on to elaborate on lack of experience compared to Western design firms, tendency to artificially hold out and not push the envelope, favoring quantity over quality in design process, putting low cost and quick turnaround ahead of deep research and well thought out designs. Finally, concerns over intellectual property laws (or lack thereof) to protect unique designs should not be brushed over by prospective buyers of overseas design services. 

This article reflects quite accurately experience I had recently on one of he projects I managed. My team was tasked with developing low cost product to be introduced into cutting edge competitive market segment we had just started exploring. Part of the project was to develop new enclosure design.