Google search the words 'product design' and you end up with a vague answer rather than a definition, "Product design as a verb is to create a new product to be sold by a business to its customers. A very broad concept, it is essentially the efficient and effective generation and development of ideas through a process that leads to new products."
Essentially, somebody who is capable of generating a variety of ideas to solve a problem and able to turn these ideas into something tangible. Like a sculptor turns a block of stone into a work of art, a product designer turns a series of lines on a page into something which, hopefully, improves some aspect of the users life. So, is that art or engineering? A product which functions well but lacks aesthetics wont sell as well because of its appearance but one which has a high level of aesthetics yet lacks functionality is useless. Great designers produce work which optimises function and form, sometimes the functionality is the aesthetic.
I guess the truth is, it's a bit of both. If there were no artistic elements to the process we would end up with things that perform their function yet lack character, they wouldn't engage with people in the same way and why should we bother changing the design of the product if it's going to function the same way anyway? Well, because style sells i suppose. If that wasn't the case we wouldn't have a fashion industry. We would be living in a very dull world without much flair. Without sound engineering however, product designers would end up producing things that malfunction, pose a risk to users and ultimately don't sell because they have poor functionality.
Personally, I think its counter-productive as a product designer to affiliate yourself with either being an artist or an engineer, product design lies at the intersection of many fields. They are jack-of-all-trades type people who weave in and out of different disciplines such as art, engineering, technology and science to gather information which inspires and directs their work, cross pollinating ideas from different fields to generate new and exciting solutions to a never ending stream of problems.
Product designers are neither artists nor engineers, they are both, a product designer who cannot think like an artist is unlikely to produce ideas which are truly innovative, if they only focused on the engineering everything would be black and white with no grey to draw the two together.
For me, that's the appeal of product design, it challenges you on so many levels and forces you to compile a very varied skill set which you can apply to a variety of different tasks. It encompasses a wide spectrum of types of thinking in order to end up with a product which satisfies peoples needs and their desires, whether you want to think of that as artistic engineering or applied art is a matter of personal opinion, so long as you don't confine yourself to one side or the other, I guess you're right.
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