[fatso784]

Cannot agree more. Learning the tools is the only real challenge. Once you have sufficient background knowledge in CS, you understand more of the possibilities that your creative juices can draw from.

I'm currently a joint CS/Fine Art major at Concordia University in Montreal (http://computationarts.concordia.ca/). Even though I could have went to a more "prestigious" university, they didn't have a program in creative computation. Don't get stuck in a boring typical CS curriculum. Every professor I meet in the program has been incredibly enthusiastic about what they do, and best of all, since it is a niche program compared to the size of the university, getting time to talk and know your professors is considerably easy.

As far as user-centric design goes: Most of the HCI design stuff can be picked up by just reading books on it. The more you know about human psychology/sociology and its applications to computer interaction the better.