Lately I've been hearing and reading "tossing it over the wall" a lot from industry professionals. Engineers are intimately familiar with this phrase, which has begun to be conjoined to calls of "we need better collaboration" and a "multidisciplinary approach" to design and engineering. For that, all of us can thank, first, Apple, and now the Internet of Things.

Connected-everything is bringing us novel devices that manage our lives. Just about every new product has complex electronics, computer-based control, and telecommunications abilities, from wrist-worn fitness trackers to million-dollar industrial machines. As Chris Rahn, a Penn State professor, quipped to Design News recently in an interview, "Who would have guessed that a company making thermostats would be worth $3.2 billion?"

I am seeing two things happening as we dive into IoT and condensed product development cycles: greater integration between engineering and industrial design and demand for mechatronics expertise. Engineers may scoff, but think about how the original Apple iPod, with its interface and click-wheel control, revolutionized how people toted their portable music -- the result of brilliant, holistic design and engineering, as Tom Kramer, president of Kablooe Design, put it in a recent Design News column. Competing MP3 players at the time were technically and functionally just as sound as the iPod, but no one remembers iRiver, do we?

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Now we are seeing an explosion of mobile and digital health devices with inventive form factors and user interfaces. These empowering tools mean greater servicing and managing ourselves, which means a big need for foolproof user experiences (UX). At the recent Atlantic Design & Manufacturing show, a Design News industry event, Sean Hughes of Philips spoke about interaction design's role has in preventing improper device usage and inaccurate data from being sent in telemedicine. With our health on the line, good industrial design is more than making things look pretty.

Mitch Maiman, president of IPS, a full-service product engineering and industrial design firm, in a Design News column, described the uneasy alliance mechanical engineers and industrial designers have struck and how it is now commercial and industrial software engineering's turn with UX designers. Resist, as many engineers might, but look around the manufacturing plant. Machine HMIs are beginning to resemble the touchscreens and visual-based flows on our personal devices; eventually the E-stop might be the only button on a machine operator interface. This buttonless, icon-driven interoperability is not a dumbing-down movement but rather what has come to be expected from consumer technology that has proved to work.

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Are you being asked to have Aunt Mary come on the plant floor and expertly operate a metal-cutting machine or an injection molding and assembly cell like she does with Facebook? Of course not, but in this day and age, an engineer with a good sense of ergonomics -- or who can work with input by an industrial designer -- is going to be more valuable than an engineer who simply wants to crunch the systems and then pass the project onward.

The consensus is that design and manufacturing companies that don't change from legacy organizational structures - those that silo and delineate product development functions - will struggle, while those that take holistic, systems-integration approaches will do well. And those that hire exclusively engineers with laser-focused disciplines could falter to those that seek the growing pool of mechatronics professionals with interdisciplinary knowledge and skills. Already, we are seeing successes by smaller, nimble firms with cross-trained engineers or which can synthesize their multidisciplinary teams.

Will you be throwing it over the wall and away?

Will Ng is a perfectionist who has been in business journalism for more than 15 years, many of which have been devoted to covering manufacturing, technology, and industry. A writer first, he loves to tell a good story and enjoys reporting on market trends and news.