Our BA (Hons) Product Design course focuses on exploring human needs and new opportunities for the development of innovative design-led solutions, connecting the consumer experience of products, services and systems. Through a programme of study that examines the emergent issues affecting design across society and culture you will learn how to be a designer of products that enhance functionality, interactions and relationships with the people and places we inhabit.

You will develop essential skills in creative methods, critical approaches to research, design thinking, prototyping and design strategy, applying design intelligence to the creation of new product opportunities and solutions. You will discover how to design products that embrace both traditional and contemporary approaches to production and manufacturing through exploring the application of materials, processes, and technologies that augment the analogue and the digital worlds. This course will enable you to develop the creative and professional skills required to support a sustainable career in product design and the associated creative industries.

What’s the difference between Product Design, and the Product Design & Craft course?

The two courses run alongside each other and have been developed to look at the reasoning for objects that surround us, from the cherished personal possessions to the functional items that facilitate our daily life. In exploring the rich diversity of creative opportunities across the subject area, it is not the category of product that determines it as a piece of product design or a piece of product design craft, but how it has been arrived at through the creative process, underpinned by the factors that have informed and driven its creation.

• The Product Design course provides a human-centered focus, designing products that respond to identified needs and new market driven opportunities that aim to enhance user experience, utility and value.
• The Product Design & Craft course provides a designer/maker focus, pursuing experimental approaches that are often driven by individual responses to social, political and environmental issues in the creation of the designed object.

Graduates of this course go on to establish their own creative businesses as self-employed practitioners, or pursue careers as product designers, furniture designers, ceramicists, jewellers, retailers, gallery owners, retail buyers, design managers, design consultants, teachers and lecturers.