Hi, I’m a Year 13 student at Lindisfarne College, New Zealand. I’m a top student in Art Design and Graphics, and am serious about pursuing a design course, in the rough field of Product Design/Industrial/Spacial design (Would do all three if I could).
With my last year of high school and university selection coming soon, I’ve been looking to either do a Bachelor of Design at Massey University in Wellington, majoring in either Industrial or Spatial Design, or a Bachelor of Design at AUT in Auckland, majoring in Product design.
However, I’ve had interest in studying overseas, US in particular, thinking it’d essentially be better than here in NZ.
I haven’t really had much luck in my search for US courses, and would like to know of a courses on Product Design, Industrial or Spacial Design in the US, (or along the lines of that), and what the best ones are.
Stanford offers a great programme for these kinds of things with their dschool. It’s usually regarded as the best design program offered at one of the premier US Universities. They partner a lot with IDEO, which is a San Fran based product design firm (responsible for creating the worlds first computer mouse among other crazy things). I’m planning to take a few courses there just out of interest.
For more details, check this out:
The Digital Media Design program at the University of Pennsylvania can suite you very well. It is a program especially focused on the intersection between computer science and art, which leads nicely into spacial design and product design, both of which employ a large amount of Computer Aided Design and tools such as Autodesk Maya. In addition this program is also very valuable for computer generated animation if you are interested in that too - each year all of the major companies in animation such as Pixar and Dreamworks come to our program with intentions of recruiting employees and interns. This is definitely one of the best programs in the US for design that heavily integrates the use of computer science and digital tools. Have a read of our offical website as well:
http://cg.cis.upenn.edu/dmd_program.html
Definitely take a look at Penn and Stanford as mentioned in some of the other replies. Also check out Carnegie Mellon’s program, Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.