Studying product design

Courses in product design explore the ever-changing ways of making connections between objects and people. When choosing a college or university you should consider each course’s curriculum, employability of graduates, reputation, location, facilities, staff—student ratio, and above all, philosophy. Courses come in all shapes and sizes and you need to decide what is right for you: a studio-based course focusing on conceptual individuality, or a technical university-based course focused on producing design for a specialist sector.

On your course you will be taught the broad process of how to make and talk product design that enables you to develop and appropriately define the boundaries of your own personal approach. Instructors value innovative and thoughtful exploration and development of concepts through drawn, physical, and virtual sketching in combination with a hands-on engagement with people, materials, technologies, markets, and methods of fabrication. Facilities at colleges and universities usually include drawing studios and individual offices, computer labs for two-dimensional and three-dimensional CAD, and workshops for producing three-dimensional prototypes.

Leading universities and colleges provide dedicated personal desks and studio space. Also encouraging peer group collaboration and a dynamic and creative studio culture, the design studio is set up to work as the student’s home from home.

What you study

Undergraduate courses are usually three or four years in duration. In Europe they are often preceded by a foundation year where students are exposed to a broad art and design education before selecting their chosen discipline.

During the early years of study, students usually undertake a series of fundamental three-dimensional design problems structured around innovation and making techniques that explore and develop research, drawing, innovation, prototyping, fabrication, manufacturing and communication techniques. Collaborative workshops, industrial visits, lectures, drawing classes and computer-aided design studies are commonly used to support these projects.

Having developed key skills and an understanding of the discipline, students then progress to more in-depth projects intended to develop their understanding of form, interaction and material through the exploration of new techniques and start to develop their personal product design direction or specialism.

During the final year of undergraduate study, students consolidate and refine their design practice and techniques, developing an individual design agenda, philosophy, and style that they demonstrate through a self-directed major project. They communicate an awareness of the commercial potential of their work and the wide-ranging career possibilities for the future.

The workshop is a vital facility during studies and provides the student with the opportunity to develop their products through the manufacturing of prototypes, test rigs, and models.

Design projects

During your studies you will move from basic instructor-set briefs through to externally set projects such as live examples with companies or design competitions, and on to more detailed and comprehensive self-generated product design projects, sometimes leading to your final degree show.

As major projects are often the first time students get the chance to generate their own briefs, this freedom can result in self-indulgent pet projects, superficial novelty generation, or unrealistic expectations. Dreaming up new ideas is not that difficult, but coming up with good ideas is. How we discriminate between the merely novel and the genuinely good lies in the fit: how it fits to technology and if it is fit for society.

To explore notions of “fitness for purpose,” you have to think about processes of innovation and engage with the challenge of being more systematic, more rational, more explicit, and more critical. Every design project needs to show its relationship to precedents, historical and contemporary examples. Your ideas are not merely ideas dreamed up from nowhere. Despite the pretence that we start from zero, we all stand, in fact, on the shoulders of giants. It is essential that you display a good understanding and acknowledgment of the sources you draw upon. It is also essential that you test your concepts, using a variety of established and proven techniques while also forging innovative approaches to the design process.

Your design project must build a design language that is fit for purpose, and not just be about an enclosed and narrow self-expression. As Charles Eames pointed out, self-expression has no place in design!

• Who is this design for? It may be a group of users, or a business.
• Look for projects that are socially appropriate and that, where possible, have real value to a distinct and specified group of users.
• Try to display an understanding of technical and material processes.
• Faced with a set of rigorous criteria, evaluating your design work from an aesthetic, social, technical, cultural, philosophical, functional, and marketing context, your emergent tentative ideas will move from fragile concepts to robust viable products fit for the marketplace.
• A project can address any number of issues, but ultimately could be proposing something new and innovative. Try to make it useful, usable, and delightful or innovative in some way.
• It may comment on the state of, or trends in, our society and thus help to make people think about the nature of our society and whether design solutions can help effect positive change within it.
• It may solve an identified problem with an existing product, or it may be about fulfilling an identified consumer need/market opportunity or a brand’s commercial need.

Ideally, all approaches should result in a design project that makes life better in some way for someone, and can be assessed against a set of agreed criteria.

While studying design, students will be involved in critiques of their project work through discussion, collaboration, and evaluation.

Presentations may be held at regular intervals, e.g. at key points during project work, at project reviews, and end-of-year assessments. These may be formal or informal, showing work in progress within small groups of students, and may be accompanied by visual aids, performance, and/or installations. Formal presentations are known within the design world as “critiques” (more commonly abbreviated to “crits”), which constitute a formal appraisal and discussion of completed work. All students attend these events and gain a comparative view of their work in relation to that of their peers. Crits involve dialogue between student and instructor, and may be held individually or in a group setting. They are a vital means of assessing a student’s work.

The assessment schemes used to evaluate student work vary between different universities and colleges, and your specific course handbook will explain what level of achievement the grades you gain represent. Projects are commonly assessed by teams of staff and moderated by discussion, before being confirmed by an external examiner, who has been invited from industry or academia to ensure that the assessment and quality procedures meet the required standards.

You may also be expected to undertake peer and self-evaluation and assessment of fellow students. This process improves your critical analysis and helps develop a sense of responsibility and control over the subject matter. When you are giving feedback to your colleagues, you should always aim to balance positive comments with negative ones, and focus on whether they have achieved what they set out to and met their assessment criteria (often referred to as learning outcomes). In order that feedback is valuable, and enhances your personal and peer group learning, it must be specific, descriptive, and non-judgmental. It should also be directed toward the individual and linked with his or her personal goals and aspirations.

Final year student projects can address many issues, as evidenced by this small selection of project designs.

The degree show

Your school may or may not require a show at the end of your course of study. In the UK, however, this show will be the culmination of your studies, giving you and your colleagues the opportunity to showcase the original, innovative, and inspiring work you have produced so far. In today’s Internet age, it is essential that you have a website to promote your show, listing the names of all the students exhibiting, featuring visitor information including the venue, dates, and opening times, a map with directions, and a clear webpage heading to ensure that search engines such as Google will list your site.

Your instructors should have a mailing list of companies that need to be invited, and you should produce posters and flyers that you can send to design companies and local press. Remember to use the website address on all promotional material and make sure you ask other relevant websites to link to it.

Make sure that your display is hung with real care and attention to detail. To present a professional show, you should ensure consistency and make sure signage and exhibition labels use the same fonts and layouts. You should all have business cards with your name, email address, and phone number on them. Ideally this will have an image of your work on it to remind the visitor what they saw in the show, as this will be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to launch yourself into the world of design.

The degree show is an opportunity for students to present their products, skills and abilities to potential employers.

Many influential designers, companies, collectors, retailers, and galleries visit degree shows as talent spotters and you should always have someone to meet and greet visitors on arrival to the exhibition. You should consider wearing name badges so visitors can identify who they want to talk to, and you and your colleagues should have a basic knowledge about each other’s work on display and be confident enough to present somebody else’s work if they are not there, as you will probably be invigilating the show in shifts.

You may wish to produce a catalog for the show featuring work from all the exhibitors. While this can be a costly option, it does provide a lasting document that visitors will hold onto long after the show has ended. You can charge a small fee to cover some of your design and print costs if your instructor feels this is appropriate. A comments or visitors book is a useful way of collecting feedback, and contact details can be used for post-show mailouts providing consent has been given.

Many colleges and universities aim to further promote their design courses and graduates by exhibiting on a bigger stage at prominent and prestigious graduate art and design shows, which bring the strongest graduates together under one roof, such as New Designers and Free Range in London. You may also be lucky enough to exhibit at a major trade show such as the famous, and highly influential, Milan Design Week Satellite Show. Exhibiting at these events enables you to show your work to the general public and, most importantly, potential employers, giving you the best opportunity to promote your work, and possibly winning one of the prestigious prizes awarded by panels of sponsors and industry observers at such events.

Detail from a degree show. If a number of students have produced products for a similar context then it can often be appropriate to exhibit them together.