These are just some of the questions that keep us awake in the MID program!

Innovation requires questioning existing boundaries and making connections between diverse disciplines. It entails the ability to recognize problems and opportunities others have missed, and the ability to reimagine innovative, sustainable and durable solutions for people and society ranging from tangible artifacts to services, experiences and environments.

In an age when new technologies and automation are continually changing the way we think about human activities and future jobs, Industrial Design is faced with challenges that question the field itself. Designing successfully for and with new industries and technologies will require ambidextrous designers who are flexible, critical, creative and highly capable of working and collaborating in different contexts, across domains and most importantly under different roles. Design practitioners, scholars and students will need to be more than developers, managers or human-centered researchers — they will need to be change-makers, leaders and above all connectors. The MID program offers a competence-based curriculum, with tools and training on how to be[come] this design connector of the future.

Industrial Design is a human-centered discipline that questions existing boundaries and makes connections among diverse domains. Therefore, the program challenges students to develop the ability to recognize and define problems in new ways, and thus find opportunities others might have missed or undervalued. As a strategic problem-solving process, Industrial Design tries to reimagine how we should go about developing innovative, sustainable and durable solutions for people and society at large that genuinely lead to better quality of life and better futures. The MID program actively connects with other knowledge domains and disciplines, to research how things are with the drive to propose how they ought to be. This is achieved through the challenging balance between critical and creative ways of thinking (and working) when devising novel, useful and meaningful artifacts, services, experiences and environments. Ultimately, the program integrates the design triad of people, business and technology in innovative ways and is based on insightful research to create new value and competitive advantage in a variety of societal, economic and environmental contexts.

The MID is accredited and recognized as a terminal degree in Industrial Design. This graduate program is designed to offer a significant mix of skills and experiences, including students from different disciplinary backgrounds, faculty-directed research programs, internships, international study abroad, industry-sponsored coursework and teaching experience.

Iowa State’s MID program is positioned in one of the most comprehensive design colleges in the country, facilitating the integration of methodologies and skill sets from multiple disciplines. Additionally, the program has established curricular connections to the nationally ranked College of Engineering and the Debbie and Jerry Ivy College of Business at Iowa State University, as well as to numerous industry collaborators and practitioners.

Degree requirements include completion of a 2-year, 60-credit program, including a required core (45 credits), departmental electives (9-12 credits) and or experiential learning credits (3-6 electives.) The final MID Graduate Project includes one of the following: creative component with a design process report opting for one of the following modes as Graduate Project: creative component with a design process report (6 credits) or research-based written thesis (6 credits).  To note that students and their supervisory team work collaboratively on this required final grad project, integrating both theory and fabrication in the creative component, and research with/for a complex design problem.

The MID program does not require a bachelor’s degree in industrial design and is open to students from any other disciplinary background (please see below). Information about our program and how to apply can be obtained from the Graduate College site, or send an email directly to the MID graduate recruitment services, mid@iastate.edu.