In 2010, gradID was ranked nationally as the number one graduate industrial design program both in U.S. News & World Report and in DesignIntelligence. In five of the last six years, it has been ranked number one in DesignIntelligence’s America’s Best Architecture & Design Schools issue, which bases its ranking by asking professional offices, “Which colleges best prepare graduates for their profession.”

Alumni from GradID: Kevin Bethune (link: Kevin’s story) | Jan Lienhard | Leticia Cervantes | Juno Chen | Erin Ballard | Magdalena Paluch | La Mer Walker

Alumni from GradID: Liu De | Li Ningning | Yu Pengtao | Wang Zhiyao

Alumni from GradID: Thomas Smiley | Ariane Fund

“Strategic innovation” is how we define our program’s design methodology.

At its core, strategic innovation takes a systems-level view and strives to balance the business, technological and human aspects of any challenge. It’s a creative process and a disciplined skill set for creating empathetic solutions to complex and unstructured problems. And it’s a broadly applicable approach that allows designers—and the organizations they work with—to be resilient and to grow.
The role of designers is shifting dramatically within enterprise. Companies used to employ designers to make their offerings more appealing or functional—usually long after executives had made plans for what to offer their customers. Today, as organizations navigate hyper-competitive markets, they are also looking to design at the earliest stages to help steer them to the future. Tomorrow’s designers will add essential value to business by identifying areas of expansion and opportunity, designing organizational change and inspiring and leading transdisciplinary teams to innovate for a better future.
In order to succeed in this new environment, designers must understand, embrace and incorporate business principles early on in their thinking and processes. That is why our program stresses that students’ ideas should take the form of fully-integrated business models. And in order to create meaningful solutions for a rapidly changing world, we as industrial designers must draw upon a wide range of experiences. That is why both our faculty and students come from a variety of educational, cultural and professional backgrounds.
As a graduate program, we engage in ongoing research to advance knowledge in our field and to continuously improve our methods. We design with a consciousness that our products and innovations exist in a larger social and ecological context. And because our methodologies focus on the process of solving problems, they can be broadly applied to a variety of issues, whether they exist in environments, products, transportation, networks, media or beyond.
We’re confident our graduates receive the theories, knowledge and practice necessary to emerge as the types of creative leaders our evolving world increasingly needs.

Are you right for GradID?

We’re looking for bright, articulate, intellectual, literate and social individuals.
Students with industrial design undergraduate degrees and various levels of professional experience comprise a slight majority of our student body. We prefer students with professional industrial design experience whose work has resulted in market-tested designs. However, we also accept candidates with a wide variety of undergraduate degrees and professional experience. In fact, breadth in the background of our students plays an important role in defining the transdisciplinary culture of our program.
We’re especially interested in individuals who can:
• Make appropriate and human-centered designs.
• Write and communicate effectively with language.
• Demonstrate an understanding of, and experience with, 3D form and design.
• Draw effectively and visualize via other methods and mediums.
• Select important projects and identify real needs.
• Research, investigate and analyze design topics.
• Experiment, think laterally and engage in creative idea-generation activities.
• Demonstrate consistently great visual design sensibility and ability, with an attention to style, proportion, shape, material, color, etc.
• Take a systems approach to design solutions and demonstrate an understanding of the business, technological and human related aspects of the design context.
• Create value for the human condition, in addition to satisfying an aesthetic appetite for consumption-driven style and fashion products (e.g. chairs, desk sets, most cars, and designer teapots).
Portfolio Format
We pay close attention to the design of the experience that applicants create for us with their portfolio. Applicants should consider messages conveyed by the design of their portfolio and clearly show their ability to meet the requirements for application as outlined on Art Center’s website (artcenter.edu).
Binders and portfolios that keep work organized are desirable. Digital versions of work (CD or DVD) are acceptable. Powerpoint and Keynote files are preferred. Please make sure that files are easy to understand and, whenever possible, that the work is organized in a single executable file. Titles and descriptions of work should be included.
Admissions Process
All candidates should visit the Admissions page on the Art Center website, where admissions requirements are outlined. Applications are for entry to the Fall term only. February 1 is the deadline for priority consideration, including potential for scholarship award, with decisions being made in the month of March. Applications will continue to be accepted after the deadline as long as space is available, but there is not guarantee that those applications will be reviewed for scholarship award.
Scholarships and Financial aid are available. Procedures and deadlines are outlined on the website.
We strongly encourage students to visit the campus and to meet with the GradID department chair. To arrange a general visit and tour, call 626.396.2373.
To schedule an interview with GradID, call 626.396.2464.