Industrial Design, anyone?

I could see this being a field a person might never know about, depending on what path their lives took, because it's outside many academic tracks:

http://www.collegeboard.com/csearch/majors_careers/profiles/careers/105108.html

Career: Industrial Designers

Calvin Klein may have designed your jeans, but who designed the chair you’re sitting on? Industrial designers work behind the scenes to shape everyday products, from food packaging and appliances to toys and cars.

While their work may not seem glamorous, they serve a very vital function -- and they make better money than most other types of designers, too.

Industrial designers work with engineers to design everyday goods, most of them mass produced.


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Neat stuff. So how do you access this field, what credentials do you need, and where do you go to get them? This seems to span fine arts schools and engineering schools.

Here's what the often irksome US News ranking list says - but at least it identifies some. I had not heard of several of these, but that doesn't mean much.

Still to come: how accessible any of this is for a midlife career switcher?

Industrial Design Schools

Fine Arts Specialty Rankings: Industrial Design
Ranked in 2008
1 Art Center College of Design Pasadena, CA
2 Rhode Island School of Design Providence, RI
3 Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh , PA
4 Pratt Institute Brooklyn, NY
5 Ohio State University Columbus, OH
6 University of Cincinnati Cincinnati, OH
7 Cranbrook Academy of Art Bloomfield Hills, MI
8 California College of the Arts San Francisco, CA
Rochester Institute of Technology Rochester, NY
10 Arizona State University Tempe, AZ
University of Illinois--Urbana-Champaign Champaign, IL