I just graduated from Olin this past May, and I wanted to let you know that Olin is working hard to provide its students with more exposure to industrial designers. Last year, Olin ran two classes where its students worked closely with industrial designers.
In Product Design and Development, teams of Olin engineering students, Babson business students, and RISD industrial design students worked together to develop products from concept to prototype.
In Distributed Engineering Design, Olin students joined industrial design students based in Switzerland and Mexico on a project for Volkswagen. Both these classes are other examples of the design “depth” courses that Mikell mentioned.
Olin students also have access to formal HCI studies at Brandeis and Wellesley.
While Olin offers these classes to interested students, it also integrates design practices into many of the courses that are not nominally “design” courses. Like Mikell said, the ideas presented in Olin’s design courses “permeate the curriculum.”

-Joe
Olin ’09

I graduated from Olin in 2006. UOCD is just one part of the design track; there is also Design Nature (a freshman class with studies in biomimetic design) and you have to take an additional design “depth” course which can be, for example, Human Factors in Interface Design. You can focus your design work on your particular major. Some students go further, others stick with those minimum requirements, but the “start with finding out what people want” theme permeates the entire curriculum.

~Mikell

You started out saying that the school has a strong multi-disciplinary approach with an emphasis on design. But I didn’t catch any real exposure to Human Computer Interaction studies, and industrial design in the program. Or maybe you just meant that User Oriented Collaborative Design Course is the Olin solution.