Product Design

Content

We were the first Industrial/Product Design programme in the UK.

Since 1938, our lecturers & alumni have been responsible for many groundbreaking products such as the first laptop computer (Bill Moggeridge), the London Routemaster Bus (Douglas Scott), and the Apple iPhone (Daniele De Iuliis/Apple Industrial Design Group) amongst many other well-known products. We look to our graduates to carry on in this tradition, to innovate, to be questioning practitioners who understand the potential and the responsibilities implied by their contributions to the material world.

Product Design at Central Saint Martins operates some key principles:

Design is about people - The outcomes of design need to meet the wants and needs of real people. Designers therefore, have to understand people and their behaviours before formulating a design response to their wants and needs.

We engage directly with industry - We work with the business world throughout the programme and we have strong links with many major enterprises including of late: Proctor & Gamble, Kodak, Body Shop, Panasonic, ICI, Coca-Cola, Samsonite, Artek, Samsung, Liberty, and Absolut amongst others.

We stay up to date with the shifting practices of design - All of our design teaching staff are engaged in professional practice today.

Design is a process - not a thing - Product design is the practice of applying a specific process to particular contexts. Mastering this practice makes our graduates flexible, confident and creatively adventurous.

Learning is deepest when undertaken collectively - We believe in the intensity of the design studio as a forum for teaching and learning.

The incredible diversity of backgrounds brought to the student group enriches the learning experience - BA (Honours) Product Design currently boasts some 38 nationalities aged 20-36, working together at the centre of the World's most cosmopolitan city.

London is an incredible creative resource - and we use it

The production of products is also the production of meanings, and both bring responsibilities for the designer - Our graduates are well equipped for, and are expected to, question and justify their work's existence and purpose in the world.

Structure

The course runs for 90 weeks full time over three years, and is divided into three Levels, (or Stages) each lasting 30 weeks.

Product Design at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design is externally recognised as a distinctive course within the UK, one where rigorous critical thinking develops creative practitioners who generate work that is highly diverse, creative and commercially relevant.

Stage 1

Stage 1 starts by building your subject knowledge and skills whilst introducing you to our brand of studio working and integrates you within our community of practice. Through a series of projects you focus on the acquisition and development of specific product design skills such as computing, 2D & 3D sketching, workshop skills in wood, metal, & plastics, knowledge of design for manufacture intellectual skills such as semiotics. The year finishes with a tour of London design studios to give you intimate insights into the breadth of practices naming themselves product design.

Stage 2

Stage 2 extends your skills and locates you in professional contexts through external briefs provided by industry. Here you get the opportunity to consider and plan your future as a practitioner and to take more responsibility for initiating and managing your own work.

Stage 3

Stage 3 provides you with an extended opportunity to address your own agenda by through writing and design exploration. This is a great opportunity for you to bring together the creative, intellectual, entrepreneurial, and practical capacities you have developed in the previous two years and results in a product design outcome which is limited only by the time allocated and your own ambitions. The final year closes with a real-world scenario in which you are partnered with an external client to undertake a specific project. This project provides a really useful springboard into professional design practice.

Main Study Practice comprises:

• Design Studies
• Technical Studies
• Contextual Studies

Main Study Practice

The course believes that to have validity a design must be clearly rooted within multiple contexts. These may be social, technological, market, manufacturing, and cultural contexts; and any resolved product design outcome must be capable of manufacture, either in batch or mass-produced volumes. The following should provide you with some insight into the rationale for each of these areas of study.

Design Studies

The ability to generate and translate ideas into resolved designs is a crucial capacity. Design Studies develops your creativity with idea generation and problem-solving methods and the drawing and presentation techniques, sketch and finished model making, project management, and verbal presentation skills that you will need to develop and communicate your designs.

Technical Studies

With reference to industrial contexts of batch and mass-production, Technical Studies enables you to gain an understanding of materials and processes, manufacturing methods, 2D and 3D CAD skills. It develops your ability to research and specify the components, materials and manufacturing processes, appropriate for any product design project.

Contextual Studies

Contextual Studies examines some of the key historical, theoretical, and social contexts from which products acquire meaning and in which product design practice operates. Crucially in our programme, it is taught in-studio alongside Design Studies to introduce ideas and thinking from radically different disciplines to inform and energise design projects.