Program Overview

BA Product Design

Course Overview

The BA Product Design course takes a user-centered approach to designing innovative, sustainable, and forward-thinking products for volume production, including furniture, healthcare products, toys, and consumer electronics. The long-established degree course aims to prepare students for a range of roles in the creative industries, including product design, UX design, research, development, modeling, visualization, and design management.

Main Study Themes

• Visualising and prototyping: explore a range of hands-on and digital tools and techniques with access to extensive workshop facilities.
  • This theme focuses on developing practical skills in prototyping and visualization.
• Design for manufacture: balance aesthetic and functional requirements to optimize products for sustainable production.
  • This theme emphasizes the importance of considering manufacturing processes and sustainability in product design.
• Human-centered design: design products informed by insights and trends identified through focused research, delivering a rich user experience.
  • This theme highlights the need for product design to be centered around user needs and experiences.

Course Information

The practice of Product Design primarily refers to the design of products for high-volume manufacture. The course aims to prepare students for the broadest practice as product designers in industry by embracing many of the transferable skills desirable by other sectors of the creative industries and beyond. The way in which products are manufactured, the technologies involved, and the way products are distributed, used, and recovered, continue to introduce new challenges to the discipline.

The course celebrates the use of design studios as a fundamental element of design training alongside the making of 3D objects as a means of testing prototyped ideas, evaluating suitability for user and environment, and finally as a means of communicating finished design proposals and user experiences. The studio culture promoted will have prepared students for working in professional design environments, able to contribute positively to discussions around design and how it is practiced. They will have been guided in the compilation of a portfolio of professional-level work, supported in interview practice, and the ability to publish their work digitally for a global audience of potential employers and collaborators.

Course Specification

The course is structured over three years, with the following modules:

• Foundation year - Level 3
  • Art, Design and Media 1: Exploration
  • Art, Design and Media 2: Transition
  • Foundation Academic English 1 for Design and Media
  • Foundation Academic English 2 for Design and Media
• Year 1 - Level 4
  • Design Exploration
  • Design Visualisation
  • Design Enquiry
  • Design Context
  • Design Experience
  • Design Reflection
• Year 2 - Level 5
  • Visual Language
  • Design in Practice
  • Professional Development: Product Design
  • Research-Informed Design
  • Product Development
  • Design for Manufacture
• Year 3 - Level 6
  • Final Major Project: Definition
  • Final Major Project: Research
  • Final Major Project: Ideation
  • Final Major Project: Resolution

Course Review

The course content is regularly reviewed to make it relevant and current for the benefit of students. For these reasons, course modules may be updated.