Product Design

Entry requirements

You will normally have an undergraduate honours degree or a degree-equivalent postgraduate diploma or a professional qualification. Alternatively, you may be admitted if you can demonstrate appropriate knowledge and skills at honours degree standard.

Months of entry

September

Course content

This course is at the forefront of production design and manufacturing practices. It brings together students from creative and technical backgrounds to foster original approaches to product design for manufacture, supporting you to explore and develop personal design methodologies and philosophies, and locate these within a deep understanding of historical, contemporary and future design practices, and wider social and cultural contexts.

You will undertake Core units delivered by production design specialists, consisting of design theory and practice lectures, material and manufacturing workshops, group seminars, individual tutorials, live external projects, and research study trips. Practical design development is supported by extensive hand and machine workshops for wood, metal, ceramics, glass and plastics, and digital workshops for laser cutting and large scale CNC routing.

Optional units facilitate innovative cross-disciplinary opportunities, supporting the development of collaborative working with students from within the material making and manufacturing cluster of MA/MSc/MFA Craft and MA/MSc/MFA Textile, and across the wider postgraduate design community. There are cross-faculty options to study within the faculty of “Science and Engineering”, acquiring advanced 3D CAD skills for industrial production, and utilising the latest advanced 3D printing processes. The “Manchester Metropolitan Business School” option addresses commercial aspects of design, enabling students to locate their ambitions within a defined financial model.

You will able to explore and challenge all aspects of product design, embracing opportunities for innovation across markets and production levels, from one-off making and batch fabrication, to flexible digital manufacture and high volume industrial production.

Your programme of study is managed through personal learning plans, developed in response to your individual creative and professional ambitions. The final “Synthesis” unit determines the postgraduate award, with the MSc reflecting work that has a more technically and functionally innovative focus, and the MA for work that addresses more materially creative or culturally focussed agendas. This innovative structure provides students with the opportunity to convert their practice from BA to MSc, and vice versa.

Features

• While studying towards a particular qualification at MA/MFA level, students experience their subject in the broader context of contemporary design practice.
• Dedicated spaces for the postgraduate community have been developed to enable the postgraduate community to flourish. These spaces, for thinking and practice, are based in the heart of Manchester School of Art, allowing easy access to an extensive range of workshops where the combination of traditional and state of the art equipment opens up a world of exciting possibilities.
• You will be taught by research active staff who are part of the Manchester School of Art Research Centre and experts in their field.
• The University library has outstanding Art and Design holdings, including a special collection of artist's books and ephemera.