Here is a typical conversation I have when meeting new people during my summer in San Francisco.
IDEO designer: What are you studying?
Me: Interaction design.
IDEO designer: Where?
Me: Carnegie Mellon.
IDEO designer: I didn’t know they teach design.
This frustrates me to no end. Here I am at what I believe to be the premier interaction design school in the country and people in the industry have no idea CMU teaches design. Lovely.
So why is this the case? For one, CMU doesn’t pump out a 100 students a year, like the Institute of Design. Every other person I meet out here went to school there. However, I like the small factor of CMU, so I’m not suggesting the school take more students. In fact, I would be against that.
But I do think the School of Design doesn’t market itself well. This is most easily apparent by looking at the School of Design website, which tells you little about the actual work and conversations that go on in the school. As its portal to the world, the site offers a closed door to the brilliant teachers and amazing students within the school. I’m quite embarrassed by the site, and think a complete overhaul is needed.
The website aside, how come no one knows CMU teaches interaction design?
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4 responses to “Carnegie Mellon a graduate design school?”
I think we’ve talked about this before, but it seems like the only people that know CMU Design are the people that know CMU Design. Being down the street from IIT, every other person here is from there up through many levels of management.
I think it does have to do with marketing of what we do. It also seems like IIT has a much stronger relationship with companies and design consultancies around town. Having Bruce Nussbaum bring up their schools name doesn’t hurt either. He also recently wrote an article praising RCA… where’s the CMU love? So maybe it’s the combination of lack of marketing, small school, and not a great location corporate-wise.
I feel you though… besides the guys that flew out to our classroom, I rarely run into anyone who understands I’m in interaction design and not the HCI program. We’re gonna change that though, right? :)
This has been a problem for years. Some of it is size: in the 12 years the interaction design program has been around, it’s graduated less than 100 people, which is about a year’s worth of ID students. But some of it is marketing, pure and simple, and CMU Design has about zero marketing budget.
I know I try to plug CMU and the program as often as I can, always putting it in my bio and the like.
Emergence was also supposed to help shine a light on CMU, but IMHO the theme and topics of service design are still too ahead of the curve to get the kind of attention that would help. CMU should focus on its core strengths: design and technology. That is what Emergence should be about.
Dan Boyarski did do a podcast with BusinessWeek a few weeks ago on service design, but compared to the love other schools get–even schools that don’t exist yet like the d.school at Stanford–it’s pretty minor.
Not sure if this helps, but the CMU Design School is well known and respected in academic circles. This is in large part due to Dick and Dan, who have high profiles in design education. So, if you wanted to teach…. ;-)
Its also an internal problem – we don’t always know the assetts that surround us at CMU. For example, did you know that the School of Art is ranked in the top 10? Its part of the CMU culture – its not a culture of pomp and flash.
I’m not surprised the art school is in the top 10. CMU is known for technology and arts. Design gets lost in the middle.