School: OCAD University
Location: Toronto, Ontario
Undergraduate program: Bachelor of Design
Graduate program: None
Number of students: 420
Number of faculty: 45
Notable alumni: Branding legend Don Watt, Douglas Ball of Herman Miller, industrial designer Scot Laughton
Website: www.ocadu.ca/Page336.aspx
Strengths: A long history of delivering studio-based art education and a new focus integrating both novel technologies and cross-disciplinary co-operation to enhance learning
The overview: Housed in Will Alsop’s iconic Sharp Centre for Design in downtown Toronto, OCAD U’s Industrial Design program challenges students to infuse their work with global and local perspectives, including long-overlooked Indigenous views. Design studios are instrumental in students developing the methodology crucial to the design process: research, analysis, strategy, development and execution. Beyond consumer and commercial products, the curriculum looks at furniture, interaction and experience design, strategic creativity and applied innovation. The resulting work is ambitious in its synthesis of disciplines – for example, a lunch kit that addresses the world’s food crisis by doing away with meat and plastic and integrating an app for monitoring daily nutrition.