Minimum Tariff: 300
UCAS Code: BA Product Design: W240
Admisssions Tutor: Dr Gareth Loudon
Email: gloudon@cardiffmet.ac.uk

The Institute of Engineering Designers accredits the programme.

The BA course covers all of the aspects of the development of new products, from concept to production. Our user-centred approach to design (i.e. observing, listening and testing user response to products) helps ensure that our students develop into highly skilled, socially responsible designers and problem solvers, capable of making a real impact in the design profession. The knowledge and skills gained with us in our creative studio culture is substantial and can often be transferred to other disciplines in the creative industries and beyond.

The programme of study is rich and diverse allowing students opportunities to tailor their studies to meet their aspirations. This includes opportunities to interact with students from other art and design disciplines that may challenge and stimulate in ways that enrich and broaden Product Design education. We also have relationships with universities around the world. Students have the opportunity of undertaking part of their studies in culturally rich and diverse places such as Venice, Kuala Lumpur and Seoul in South Korea and many more.

In year one and year two, equipped with the ideas and skills achieved in their subject module, students choose a further module where they can employ, extend and challenge those ideas and skills. The modules on offer will include ones where students will work alongside leading researchers on an enquiry based project, and others which involve them in an exploration of a challenging subject.

Some of the modules on offer might involve a period abroad, studying in Venice or the States, or might be an Erasmus exchange. There are also opportunities to undertake a work placement or study how to set up your own business. In all of these modules, students respond to the challenges through their own practices, employing the skills and ideas from Product Design, informed and stimulated by the challenge of the module itself and by the opportunity to work with fellow students from across the School.

In the third year, students devote themselves to the exploration of their own questions, within the area of practice that they have elected through the support and advice of the academic team. In this year and especially within the dissertation and the work prepared for the final show, the product designer emerges into something unique to them and to the practice of design.

All students undertake modules that develop critical and sometimes radical approaches to how we see and construct the world. These modules provide some of the tools that can be employed to question through creative practice how meaning is made as well as why meaning is a contested area. These will also equip students for the preparation of their final dissertation. Taught on a cross-disciplinary basis, the content of these modules will draw on anything and everything, from Constable to cosmetic surgery, from Bernard Leach to Elvis Presley impersonators, and from aesthetics to punk rock.

Graduates from the programme are well placed to join design companies, work as designers in large organizations, or set up their own businesses. Some take further training, for example a PGCE. Some elect to take their studies further by studying at CSAD for an MDes or the MSc in Advanced Product Design.

In recent years our graduates have gained employment at Kinneir Dufort Design, Seymour Powell, Alloy Total Product Design, Dyson, Sony, BBC, Panasonic, Puma, Ford, Aston Martin and Jaguar. Some have also set up their own businesses such as Tonic Studios, asbri, Spin Dogs and PRO Medical Innovations Ltd to name but a few.