As 2025’s red carpet season draws to a close, Stephen Holmes reflects on the ‘method acting’ approach increasingly favoured by some product designers and applauds their willingness to commit to the role of end user
A few days on from the Oscars ceremony, I’ve been keeping an eye on the press whirlwind that inevitably follows. This year, the Academy Awards for Best Actor and Best Actress were awarded to actors in demanding roles that deviate significantly from their own life experiences.
Look away now if you’ve not seen the results. Best Actress was won by Mikey Madison, who plays a sex worker in the movie Anora. Adrien Brody, meanwhile, took home Best Actor for his role in The Brutalist, picking up the gong a second time for playing a passionate creative that survives the Holocaust (with the first time being The Pianist back in 2003).
Both in the build-up to the Academy Awards and on the red carpet, both talents were pressed about the process of ‘finding’ their roles, identifying with them and getting into character.
Madison took up new skills, learning Russian and pole dancing in order to portray her character. Brody meanwhile lent on his artistic talents and his family’s history and experiences in migrating from Europe to influence his portrayal.
Acting bug
This shape-shifting ability to fully embody another human, their life and their experiences, and channel that through mimicry, emotions and speech is part of what defines acting. Much is made of this, and aside from undercover spies and some dubious salesmen and politicians, few other people get paid for these skills.
However, the more time I spend around product designers, the more of these skills I see in their work. The traditional role of ‘The Designer’ has always been as an observer and an interpreter.
The more designers I meet, the more I find them embracing a ‘method acting’ approach, attempting to live as if they themselves were the end user
Like a nature documentary maker, they sit watching gorillas in their natural habitat, analysing their behaviours. There are also those who find and create a product for themselves, for a family member or colleagues, based on their observations of those around them.
The more designers I meet, the more I find them embracing a ‘method acting’ approach. In other words, they’re attempting to live as if they themselves were the end user. I see it regularly, the designer who is ‘always on’ – either obsessed with a project already underway or on the hunt for a new problem to tackle.
As I learnt while putting together this issue of DEVELOP3D, it’s one thing to speak to a delivery driver and maybe shadow one for a couple of hours in a sterile setting. It’s another thing entirely to send your team out to graft like one, lugging boxes in and out of a van, eating lunch behind the wheel, and engaging in not-so-diplomatic negotiations with traffic wardens.
This hands-on approach applies to multiple projects I’ve seen over the years, predominantly at design studios that serve a multitude of different markets. Much like actors, these designers are guns for hire, chasing the next paycheck.
Versatility as a leading man or lady is all very well, but for me, it doesn’t come close to most agency designers, who might on one day be developing a life-changing surgical tool and on the very next day sculpting beautiful Class-A surfaces for a piece of high-end audio equipment. The following week, they might be designing a kitchen gadget that they, the client and (deep down) the consumer knows will languish in the bottom of a kitchen drawer, unused, for a decade or so. (I look forward to receiving your Spiralizer-related hate mail.)
AI enters the scene
Much like the movies, AI is about to change our industry, and much of this could be linked to how designers get further into their research. There are already apps to filter through video footage and capture the ergonomics of drivers getting into and out of vehicles. Now imagine this at scale, with years of cabin data logged, every button pressed, every gear change made and every Wagon Wheel eaten on the road.
Suddenly, all this real-world activity becomes the stuff of endless metrics influencing the design of products, similar to how the reaction of test audiences to plotlines and characters in movies are keenly watched by studio executives.
In short, a survey is no longer enough. At this new level of data capture, delving into the minute details of human experiences should in theory create hit after hit when it comes to new products – yet it still makes many creatives uncomfortable. We feel it reduces some of the art, as though imperfection is something that makes a product more human.
Personally, I think most mainstream products will become homogenised to a point. Just look at all the similar SUVs on our roads, all with designs based on broadly the same regulations and constraints around safety, drag co-efficients and manufacturing capacity.
Yet some still vehicles still manage to stand out, guided by brilliant visionaries and supportive producers. Hollywood is far from dead, and neither is the human skill in design. But as ever, only the best efforts will take home an award.
This article first appeared in DEVELOP3D Magazine
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