Program Overview

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Product Design BA (Hons)

Discover the relationship between products, furniture, and the spaces they occupy.

What you'll study

The content of the course may be subject to change. Curriculum content is provided as a guide.

Integrated foundation year (if undertaken)

UCA’s Integrated Foundation Year is designed to give you the skills you’ll need to start your degree in the best possible way – with confidence, solid knowledge of creative practice, study skills, and more.

You’ll explore a range of creative techniques and develop your portfolio, with your chosen subject in mind. We’ll work with you throughout the year to ensure you’re on the right track and give you the tools to achieve your highest potential on your degree.

Find out more about the Integrated Foundation Year

Year one

In your first year, you’ll be developing key prototyping and visualisation skills. Starting with simple materials, you’ll progress to advanced workshop and digital techniques. You’ll also learn to clearly communicate your ideas through hands-on making and accurate sketching.

• Launch: Launch Week is the first week of your academic journey in the Canterbury School of Architecture and Design where you get to know your course staff, peer group, and the School community in greater depth.
• Design 01 – Sketch and Build: You will be introduced to a range of core skills in concept development and representation, through sketching, model making, diagramming, and time-based media. You’ll do this through a series of design projects. We want you to experiment and develop skills that are personal to you alongside skills that embrace the integrated nature of design production.
• Design for Equity 01: In this unit, you will be introduced to the technological principles, civil regulations, and societal challenges that inform contemporary design and manufacture. There are two key areas of consideration – social justice and equitable design, and the climate crisis. We want you to think critically about how the detailed design of spaces and objects (including the measures, standards, and tools of our industry) impacts upon gender, race, sexual, and bodily equality.
• Briefs and Positions 01: You’ll prepare a basic set of briefing materials that will inform and guide your development of a small-scale design proposal in the subsequent design unit Design 02 – Iterate and Adapt. To achieve this, we want you to engage in creative studio-based speculation, professional site or scenario analysis, and culturally critical research.
• Opportunity: As you start Term 2, Opportunity Week is an intensive week of activity conceived and undertaken in collaboration with external partners, with the aim of broadening knowledge and skills.
• Iterate and Adapt 01: Explore the fundamental processes of design practice through spatial or product analysis, deconstruction, documentation, and augmentation. In this unit, you’ll enhance your skills in sketching and drawing, assembly/disassembly, accurate survey, and measurement in 3D space, material analysis, and documentation of both the physical space or product and their intended programme or market.
• Critical Analysis 01: We want you to understand that the role of the designer is not always in isolation. This means seeing that objects, spaces, and systems can be designed and built by ‘constellations’ of different actors, in which the designer is situated. We’ll show you this through critical engagement with histories and theories of spatial and object design practice.
• Material and Digital Practices: This unit introduces you to basic ideas around representation as a critical practice, and core theories of the design and production of small-scale objects in 2D print and 3D physical form. Working between the physical and virtual worlds, you’ll build the foundation on which you begin to develop your visual communication skills and technological competence.
• ATOM Activities: ATOM activities are tiny pieces of individual learning that facilitate interdisciplinary exposure across the university. Collectively, they form a small fraction of your curriculum that is determined through your own personal choice and interest.

Year two

In your second year, you’ll continue to develop your fabrication and material skills, you'll also be learning how to create innovative responses to global design challenges. This will include exploring sustainability to emerging technologies.

• Launch: Launch Week for the second year will be spent gearing up for your study objectives and re-orientating after your first summer break.
• Design 03 – Fabricate and Form: In this unit, you’ll further refine your skills in sketching, model making, and visualisation, with specific focus on digital representation methodologies, and material and manufacturing constrains and opportunities. We’ll also ask you to develop research practices, examining the relationship between place/product and user, brand value, user or spatial experience, and form – and respond to this research through your design proposals.
• Design for Equity 02: In this unit, you will expand your knowledge of the technological principles, civil regulations, and societal challenges that inform contemporary design and manufacture. You’ll focus on how non-western perspectives, culturally diverse contexts, and vernacular practices can inform low-carbon approaches to spatial and product design.
• Briefs and Positions 02: In this unit, you’ll prepare a developed set of briefing materials that will inform and guide your development of a medium-scale design proposal in the subsequent design unit Design 04 – Fabricate and Form. You’ll do this through three processes - creative studio-based speculation, professional site or scenario analysis, and culturally critical research.
• Opportunity: The second term begins with Opportunity Week, an intensive week of activity conceived and undertaken in collaboration with external partners.
• Context and Constraint: You’ll expand your conceptual approach to constraint-based design by undertaking a detailed design project which brings together your technical, conceptual ideation, iterative testing, and narrative production skills in a confident and holistic way. During the process, you will explore ideas of transformation, surprise, and unknown futures through a range of possible design challenges.
• Pathways and Mentors: In this unit, we’ll challenge you to reflect on the design skills, knowledge, and techniques you are acquiring and identify potential alternative career paths that you might not yet have considered. In the course of this unit, all students will have the opportunity to engage with a design professional in a structured series of engagement and mentoring sessions.
• Critical Analysis 02: The unit, a progression from your first year of study, is primarily concerned with theory and represents a step-up in challenging you to interrogate ideas, designs, and actions. Specifically, it asks you to use theory to develop understandings of the ways in which ideas are both contextual and connected to wider logics and world views.
• ATOM Activities: ATOM activities are tiny pieces of individual learning that facilitate interdisciplinary exposure across the university. Collectively, they form a small fraction of your curriculum that is determined through your own personal choice and interest.

Professional practice year (if undertaken)

You may enrol to undertake an additional ‘Professional Practice Year’ as an integral part of this course.

This will take place in year three. You will undertake a work placement with a subject-appropriate employer to further develop your skills and CV.

Please note: If you are an international applicant, you will need to enrol onto the course ‘with Professional Practice Year’. It will not be possible to transfer onto the Professional Practice Year after enrolment.

Year three

Your final year allows you to take full ownership of your creative direction. You’ll explore a theme that matters to you through a self-directed major project. This will include developing it through research, prototyping, and reflection. This is your chance to produce an innovative body of work that showcases your ambition, creativity, and identity as a designer.

• Launch: For your final Launch Week, you’ll spend the week getting ready for your final year of study, and re-orientating after your first summer break.
• Design 05 – Pitch and Prototype: This unit challenges you to engage with exciting new technologies and to produce compelling digital and physical prototypes through the rapid acquisition and integration of new skills within your workflows. You will go on developing your individual and group working skills and start to experience the pace of work in practice as you move toward employment.
• Critical Analysis 03: You’ll produce a piece of self-directed research on a subject that is related to the historical, theoretical, and critical concerns of your subject discipline. The subject matter will be informed by the specific interests that you have developed on your course to date.
• Briefs and Positions 03: This unit is about preparing an advanced set of briefing materials to inform and guide your development of a medium-scale design proposal for the Final Major Project. You will consider a context at the scale of an expanded spatial or material network, through creative studio-based speculation, professional site or situation analysis, and culturally critical research.
• Opportunity: Opportunity Week is an intensive week of activity conceived and undertaken in collaboration with external partners.
• Major Project: After defining your own brief during the preceding Briefs and Positions 03 unit, with the support of your tutor, you will develop and complete an expansive project that uses all your skills in design, making, research, and project development. The finished work should reflect your deep understanding of contemporary practice.

Study abroad (optional)

This course is designed to offer you (if eligible) the opportunity to study part of your degree abroad at a UCA partner university, while still earning credits towards your UCA degree.

For more information, please visit the Study Abroad section.

Specifications

• Course information 2025/26 entry
• Course information annex for Integrated Foundation Year 2025/26 entry
• Student regulations

Please note, syllabus content indicated is provided as a guide. The content of the course may be subject to change in line with our Student Terms and Conditions, for example, as required by external professional bodies or to improve the quality of the course.

Explore our grad show

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Fees & funding

Tuition fees - 2025/26

• Integrated Foundation Year: £9,535
• BA course: £9,535

If you opt to study the Professional Practice Year, for 2025 you will be required to pay a reduced tuition fee of £1,900. You will also incur additional travel and accommodation costs during your Professional Practice year. The University will provide you with further advice and guidance about this.

Tuition fees - 2025/26

• Integrated Foundation Year: £9,535 (see fee discount information)
• BA course: £9,535 (see fee discount information)

If you opt to study the Professional Practice Year, for 2025 you will be required to pay a reduced tuition fee of £1,900. You will also incur additional travel and accommodation costs during your Professional Practice year. The University will provide you with further advice and guidance about this.

Tuition fees - 2025/26

• Integrated Foundation Year: £16,950
• BA course: £17,500

If you opt to study the Professional Practice Year, for 2025 you will be required to pay a reduced tuition fee of £3,390. You will also incur additional travel and accommodation costs during your Professional Practice year. The University will provide you with further advice and guidance about this.

Please note: The fees listed on this webpage are correct for the stated academic year only, for details of previous years please see the full fee schedules.

UCA scholarships and fee discounts

At UCA, we have a number of scholarships and fee discounts available to assist you with the cost of your studies.

Financial support

There are lots of ways you can access additional financial support to help you fund your studies - both from UCA and from external sources. Discover what support you might qualify for, please see our financial support information.

Additional course costs

In addition to the tuition fees, there may be other costs for your course. The things that you are likely to need to budget for to get the most out of a creative arts education will include books, printing costs, occasional or optional study trips, and/or project materials.

These costs will vary according to the nature of your project work and the individual choices that you make. Please see the Additional Course Costs section of the Course Information Document for more details of the costs you may incur.

Facilities & equipment

UCA Canterbury has open plan studio spaces offering a flexible learning environment, used for tutorials and independent working. Fully equipped Mac and PC computer labs with software for design and coding. Access to a purpose-built FabLAB with laser cutters, 3D printers, and CNC milling and injection moulding equipment, as well as virtual reality and spatial tracking technology. Campus 3D workshop with machines for working in wood, metals, plastics, and ceramics.

Opportunities

Industry links

You’ll be fully immersed in the architecture and design industries through live projects. In the past, these have included work with the leading London architecture firm AKT II, global design and architecture firms such as HOK and SOM, local government organisations, and architecture companies in Margate and Folkestone. You’ll also have the opportunity to enter industry competitions.

Careers

Graduates of the course have gone on to work at the following leading design practices:

• Platform
• Bompas and Parr
• Piercy and Co
• Harvey and John
• Grimshaw
• Hawkins Brown
• Jason Bruges Studio

Graduates of this course can expect to work within the industry in a variety of different roles.

These include:

• Product designer
• CAD designer
• Product developer
• Technical designer
• Product technician
• Furniture designer/maker
• Design and communications manager
• Market research specialist
• Purchasing manager.

You may also like to consider further study at postgraduate level.

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Entry & portfolio requirements

We’ll need to see your portfolio for this course:

• UK applicants: We will invite you to attend an Applicant Day so you can have your portfolio review in person.
• International applicants: We will ask you to submit an online portfolio. View Product Design portfolio advice

Undergraduate requirements

The standard entry requirements* for these courses are one of the following:

• 112 UCAS tariff points, see accepted qualifications
• Pass at Foundation Diploma in Art & Design (Level 3 or 4)
• Distinction, Merit, Merit at BTEC Extended Diploma / BTEC National Extended Diploma
• Merit at UAL Extended Diploma
• 112 UCAS tariff points from an accredited Access to Higher Education Diploma in an appropriate subject
• 27-30 total points in the International Baccalaureate Diploma with at least 15 IB points at Higher level, see more information about IB entry requirements.
• And four GCSE passes at grade 9-4/A*-C including English (or Functional Skills English/Key Skills Communication Level 2).

Other relevant and equivalent Level 3 UK and international qualifications are considered on an individual basis, and we encourage students from diverse educational backgrounds to apply.

*We occasionally make offers which are lower than the standard entry criteria, to students who have faced difficulties that have affected their performance and who were expected to achieve higher results. We consider the strength of our applicants’ portfolios, as well as their grades - in these cases, a strong portfolio is especially important.

Foundation year requirements

The standard entry requirements* for foundation year entry are one of the following:

• 32 UCAS tariff points, see accepted qualifications
• Pass at Foundation Diploma in Art & Design (Level 3 or 4)
• Pass, Pass, Pass at BTEC Extended Diploma / BTEC National Extended Diploma
• Pass at UAL Extended Diploma
• 32 UCAS tariff points from an accredited Access to Higher Education Diploma in an appropriate subject
• 24 points from the International Baccalaureate, see more information about IB entry requirements.
• And four GCSE passes at grade 9-4/A*-C including English (or Functional Skills English/Key Skills Communication Level 2).

Other relevant and equivalent Level 3 UK and international qualifications are considered on an individual basis, and we encourage students from diverse educational backgrounds to apply.

*We occasionally make offers which are lower than the standard entry criteria, to students who have faced difficulties that have affected their performance and who were expected to achieve higher results. We consider the strength of our applicants’ portfolios, as well as their grades - in these cases, a strong portfolio is especially important.

English Language Requirements

Undergraduate requirements

For our Bachelor's courses, we usually require that you have one of the following:

• IELTS (Academic) 6.0 overall with no less than 5.5 in any section
• TOEFL iBT 80 overall with no less than 18 in Reading, 17 in Listening, 20 in Speaking, and 17 in Writing
• Pearson Test of English (PTE) Academic 56 overall with no less than 51 in any section
• Cambridge English Advanced (CAE) 169 overall with no less than 162 in any section
• Cambridge English Proficiency (CPE) 169 overall with no less than 162 in any section

Foundation year requirements

For our International Foundation in Creative Practices and our Integrated Foundation courses, we usually require that you have one of the following:

• IELTS (Academic) 5.5 overall with no less than 5.5 in any section
• TOEFL iBT 72 overall with no less than 16 in Reading, 15 in Listening, 18 in Speaking, and 15 in Writing
• Pearson Test of English (PTE) Academic 51 overall with no less than 51 in any section
• Cambridge English Advanced (CAE) 162 overall with no less than 162 in any section
• Cambridge English Proficiency (CPE) 162 overall with no less than 162 in any section

Our Staff

• JJ Brophy: Programme Director Design
• Stephen Davies: Senior Lecturer – Product and Furniture Design
• Dr Paul D. Found: Senior Lecturer Industrial Design and Design Media
• Lucy Jones: Senior Lecturer Architecture & Design
• Robert Nice: Lecturer/Senior Lecturer Architecture and Design
• Anna Maria Baranowska: Lecturer of Interior Architecture & Design and Stage 2 & 3 Convenor
• Dr Kim Trogal: Reader in Social and Political Design

Your next steps...

• Apply Now
• Upcoming Open Days
• Submit an Enquiry

Course statistics

• BA (Hons)
• BA (Hons) with Professional Practice Year
• BA (Hons) with Integrated Foundation Year
• BA (Hons) with Integrated Foundation Year and Professional Practice Year

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