Industrial Design

Overview

Program Overview

Working with feedback from professors and peers, you create designs that combine desirability, business viability, and technical feasibility. At the Industrial Design program offered by the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign you will work to create the products, interfaces and experiences that meet people’s needs for things as diverse as toys, sports, housewares, medical devices, and pet products. We make sure you keep things real by prototyping your ideas from start to finish. You will work individually and in teams to complete a variety of projects culminating in an individual senior project—preparing you with the tools that will enable you to advance into the wider world of industrial design professional practice or a variety of other careers.

Most of our faculty members are both teachers and practicing designers. Their work ranges from the design of bicycles to sustainable and accessible consumer products and explores empathy, designing with users, and the emotional relationship to the products we use. You will work closely with these professors as you articulate your own questions and, through your design work, propose your own answers.

And what might you do in the professional world? A quick glance at career paths of our alumni will give you a good sense of the possibilities that lie ahead:

• Product design

• Transport design

• Interface and experience design

• Furniture design

• Toy design

• Design management

• Marketing

• Design entrepreneurship