The treachery of visuals
This is not a peeler
The title image is a playful riff on The Treachery of Images by René Magritte, the painting of a pipe captioned “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.” The point was not to deny the existence of the pipe, but to distinguish the object from its representation. An image of a thing is not the thing itself.
The same is true here. The object may resemble the iconic OXO Good Grips Swivel Peeler, a product our firm helped design, but it remains only an image. A peeler is not truly a peeler because it looks like one, but because it can be picked up, trusted, and used to peel a vegetable.
That distinction has always mattered when making products, but as representations become increasingly realistic and easy to create, it has become easier to lose sight of it.
When representation feels real
Modern design tools like KeyShot, Blender, and Vizcom can produce product concepts with startling realism. Materials appear convincing, lighting feels natural, and context is seamless. As fidelity increases, it becomes easier for teams to confuse visual resolution with concept resolution.
This recalls what Jean Baudrillard called the “hyperreal”, a condition in which representations become more persuasive than reality itself. In product development, this can happen when an image appears so resolved that teams begin behaving as though the product already exists. Renders gather momentum before prototypes are built, and confidence forms before assumptions have been tested.
The challenge is not imagining what could be but understanding what it will take for that idea to succeed in the real world.
One product, many perspectives
Products rarely mean the same thing to everyone involved in creating them. Each perspective (user, engineer, marketer, business leader) reveals something important, but none captures the whole picture. A solution that performs brilliantly from an engineering perspective may fail to resonate with customers; a compelling brand story may overlook practical realities; a beautiful design can introduce unexpected complexity.
Strong products emerge when these perspectives are brought together and balanced against one another. The challenge is not deciding which viewpoint is correct, but understanding how they collectively define what success looks like.
The role of the industrial designer
Industrial design is often associated with the appearance of products, but the role is fundamentally about helping ideas make their way into the world. That requires working across disciplines and reconciling competing priorities long before they become expensive problems.
Designers connect user needs to engineering realities, translate brand ambitions into tangible experiences, and help teams understand the trade-offs that shape a successful product. The role is less about creating solutions in isolation and more about building shared understanding around them.
As design processes accelerate, that responsibility becomes even more important. Artificial intelligence can now generate polished concepts in seconds, making it easier than ever for ideas to appear resolved before they have been engineered, tested, or used. The challenge is no longer producing compelling representations. It is understanding what those representations mean and what it will take to deliver on their promise.
In this environment, the value of industrial design shifts away from creating images and toward creating alignment. Designers help teams navigate the space between what is imagined, what is possible, and what will ultimately succeed in the real world.
Designing for alignment
The most effective design teams do not simply generate concepts, they structure processes that help organizations learn.
01 Framing the problem across perspectives
Before developing solutions, teams must align around what success means in practical terms: user needs, technical feasibility, and commercial realities. This means trade-offs are surfaced early rather than discovered late.
The Solo Steelfire Griddle illustrates how different stakeholders defined success in multiple ways. Consumers valued ease of cleaning, portability, and a cooking experience that encouraged people to gather around the griddle. Engineers focused on heat distribution and manufacturability. The business needed meaningful differentiation in an increasingly crowded category. Aligning around those priorities early informed key decisions, including the use of a stainless-steel cooktop and the unconventional racetrack geometry.
02 Managing fidelity intentionally
Early explorations should remain deliberately unresolved to keep possibilities open. As understanding deepens, fidelity can increase to support more targeted decision-making and alignment.
In developing the PS2 system for Poursteady, the team moved from sketches and simple prototypes to increasingly refined visualizations and working models. Matching fidelity to the stage of the project helped focus attention on the right questions at the right time, without creating a false sense of resolution too early.
03 Anchoring decisions in the physical world
The same principle applies beyond physical products. Pilots function as prototypes at the system level, creating opportunities to learn under real-world conditions rather than relying on assumptions.
For the Gatorade GX platform, a pilot conducted with athletes at IMG Academy helped the team understand not only how the Smart Cap system functioned in practice, but also how connected hydration fit into athletes’ routines and where it delivered meaningful value. Those insights helped inform the broader product and service experience before scaling.
Beyond the image
It has never been easier to create a compelling vision of the future. Turning that vision into a successful product remains considerably harder.
Images remain essential. They help teams explore possibilities, communicate ideas, and build alignment around future directions. But products are ultimately judged through use, not representation. They must be manufactured, integrated into people’s lives, and deliver on the expectations created around them.
Getting from idea to outcome requires more than a persuasive image. It requires alignment around what success looks like, a shared understanding of trade-offs, and a willingness to test assumptions before committing to decisions. The role of design is to bridge that gap, ensuring that what appears compelling in concept can succeed in reality.
The measure of a product is not how convincingly it can be represented, but how successfully it performs in the real world.