Industrial Design + Digital Media

Are there graduate design programs that combine traditional industrial design education and digital media (i.e. physical computing, Internet of Things)?

I’d wager most of the graduate programs not explicity devoted to either strategy (Illinois) or craft (Cranbrook) or a single trade (Trans anywhere) would be heavy in this area…more so on the ‘new digital media’ realms than ‘traditional ID’. I’m thinking of Media Lab, Tangible Media Group, CCA (due to location more than anything), of course D School at Stanford…

Most programs at all levels should be at least toying with this. Last I heard Carnegie Melon was pretty deep into it.

I am from a school, Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, that does exactly this. From the start on we have been implementing electronics and microcontrollers (all command line programming) into prototypes. It’s a mix of experience, interaction design, digital media and industrial design. In the states, MIT is most known for this though less focused on the design side. Georgia Tech has good programs. In the UK, there’s the RCA and also in Italy there are schools with a heavy focus on combining interactivity and product design. More and more schools are opening up to these multidisciplinary approaches - I highly recommend them.

I agree with you. They should touch some fields of mentioned traditional designs, but not strictly teach them.