High-quality "service-oriented manufacturing" has gradually become the trend of China's manufacturing industry. Under the background of industrial upgrading, Dongguan, a sample city of China's manufacturing industry known as the "world's factory", is taken as the research object. This paper focuses on the research of its industrial design business, investigates and analyzes its development status by literature method, interview method and field investigation method, clarifies the advantages and problems of the development of the industrial design industry in Dongguan, and puts forward targeted suggestions for the bottleneck problems such as weak policy supportinsufficient brand appeal, serious structural imbalance of manufacturing design ability and the lack of a sound market environment, in order to find design-powered solution for driving "China new manufacturing" and provide some reference for the development and transformation of other manufacturing cities in China.