Industrial design programs prepare people to create forms, shapes, and packages for consumer and commercial products. Students learn to make designs and prototypes. They study ways to refine existing designs to improve performance or save costs.
Sometimes, nothing hits the spot like a good old-fashioned peanut butter and jelly sandwich. You open that jar of peanut butter, dig the knife in, and take out a gob and spread it on nice fresh bread. Some of us like to skip over the sandwich part and just eat the peanut butter, right out of the jar! It's so easy to get at, after all. It's almost as if peanut butter companies WANT it to be easy to eat their delicious product.
Enter a man named Brooks Steves. In 1934, while working for Holsum Products company, he redesigned the peanut butter jar so that it had a wide mouth. Traditionally, peanut butter came in containers with tall and narrow "necks." Mr. Steves felt that those containers wasted too much peanut butter, and hence the wide-mouth jar was born!
Steves' idea is an example of industrial design. If you are both creative and mechanical, logical and forward-thinking, industrial design might be a good choice for you. You can design everyday products such as furniture, tools, and appliances (as well as food containers!) to be both beautiful and streamlined. You make sure that products are safe, good-looking, and easy to use.
In industrial design programs, you take courses from a variety of fields. You take courses in art, including art history, drawing, and design. You study engineering, from ergonomics to modeling. You also study graphic design and CAD, or computer-aided design. In addition, you take business courses, usually in marketing and research. In some programs, you even take human psychology courses. After all, you design products for people! Overall, you learn to design products that people want to buy and use.
More than 70 colleges, universities, private art schools, art institutes, and technical institutes offer accredited programs in industrial design. Many lead to bachelor of fine arts, bachelor of industrial design, or bachelor of art or science degrees. Some offer master of fine arts, master of arts, master of industrial design, master of design, or master of design methods degrees. The doctorates are designated as doctor of philosophy (Ph.D.) degrees. Colleges of engineering and architecture also offer majors in industrial design.
Completing a bachelor's degree typically takes four years of full-time study after high school. Master's degree programs take two or three additional years. If you want to teach college, you need a master of fine arts or doctoral degree. Doctoral programs typically take three to five years after the master's degree.