Educating Industrial Designers

This paper discusses the status, objectives and procedures of contemporary industrial design education. It points out that professional designers are searching for meaningful and valid guidelines for the relatively new profession, and that current attitudes and practices in design education reflect this search. The major historical movements contributing to current industrial design training are reviewed briefly. The early marriage of industrial design and the visual arts is noted, as is the increasing interdisciplinary nature of industrial design education exemplified by its extension into many new but related fields such as human factors engineering. General descriptions of typical and atypical contemporary academic programs in industrial design education are presented. Reference is made to the important contribution of the professional association of industrial designers in support of design education, the Industrial Designers Society of America.