To design is to create something new or different. When you look at a product, do you sometimes think ‘I could have designed that better’?

If you answered yes, would like to work in an innovative and enterprising sector and gain the skills necessary to create user-centred design, this could be the course for you.

You’ll benefit from practical, hands-on experience, learning from visiting designer practitioners, working on live projects, and ensuring your products are technically and commercially feasible, while also being environmentally responsible. We’ll support you to develop an underpinning skillset of engineering principles and technology and work with you to ensure you’re prepared for whatever future you have in mind, whether that’s in-house design or setting up your own business.

To achieve this and ensure you develop a range of industry-ready skills, we run multidisciplinary modules where designers and engineers work in collaboration to solve real challenges.

This course is a revised and updated version of our Industrial Product Design course, offering a combination of solid academic study with hands-on individual and team project work.

What you’ll learn

In the first year you’ll get a grounding in product design principles and the opportunity to begin to develop your design specialism.

In the second and final year you’ll take a common core of five design modules to support your projects, integrating your design specialism with the core aspects of product design. Your final year will culminate in the opportunity to display your work as part of the Aston Inspired final year design show.

We aim to provide you with knowledge of materials, production processes and technology as well as skills in aesthetics, ergonomics and management to enable you to develop a successful career in design.

We teach using a hands-on framework called CDIO - Conceive, Design, Implement, Operate – supported by 50 of the world’s top technical institutions. This enables you to apply real-world skills as you learn, enabling you to maximise your learning. You’ll do your learning in our state-of-the-art facilities, which include advanced 3D printing facilitates and a dedicated design studio with specialist equipment designed just for you.

Our graduates can demonstrate creative design skills alongside sound technical knowledge and experience, a pairing employers consider to be an advantage.

The kinds of roles our graduates go on to include: design engineers, CAD specialists and general management, education and administration. Alternatively, our graduates may choose to go on to further study.

Companies that our recent graduates have joined include: Laing, Goodrich, Husio International, The Eden Project, Sainsbury’s, Rolls Royce and Calsonic Kansei.