Product and Furniture Design

Entry requirements

• A good honours degree or equivalent in a related art, design or craft subject and/or appropriate professional experience.
• A portfolio of work reflecting your experience and skills working in 2D and 3D.
• We also welcome applicants with relevant professional or vocational experience.

Months of entry

September

Course content

This course recognises the diversity of design practice and prepares you for employment within the design industry.

You'll be given time to develop a personal design approach, learn new skills and apply them to carefully structured projects with industry partners, that prepare you for your preferred career direction. The course requires you to challenge yourself, your perceptions of design and your role as a designer.

Live client projects are an integrated feature of the course providing valuable industry experience; recently the course has worked with brands including MADE.com and Tefal. We additionally encourage independent external collaboration. You'll work in an enviable learning environment that includes newly renovated studio spaces and workshops supported by attentive academic and technical staff.

Faculty-wide technical resources available to students on this course include the 3D workshop with ceramics, big build, woodworking, metalworking, blacksmithing and bronze-casting; CNC, Laser, Zund, 3D print, state-of-the-art filming environment and animation suite; industry standard photographic suite with two new digital darkrooms; newly-specified digital media workshops with hardware and software upgraded to a professional level.

The course offers a hands-on approach to design, encompassing research techniques, collaboration, learning through making and developing finished objects intended for craft, industrial production or conceptual prototype. You'll work in the studio and workshops on specific projects reflective of the modules comprising the course. Activities can include specialist lectures, workshop inductions, group and personal tutorials, seminars and symposiums.

You'll need to be self-directed, reflective and practical in your approach, with direction and purpose.

This course is part of the Design School's postgraduate programme. The structure, shared with students from other design courses, enables you to explore your individual specialist interests within an integrative learning environment that provides an understanding of the value and role of interdisciplinary methods and ways of working. The influences and impact of thinking from other related design subjects on your own specialist study is an important aspect of the identity and the community of interdisciplinary practice at masters level in the Design School.

This structure is designed to help progress and develop your independent learning, encouraging you to construct and explore projects concerned with areas of particular personal interests. The overarching course philosophy, based upon an emphasis on research, methodology and design thinking, allows individual and personal concerns to be explored through focused study in product and furniture design.