Product design studios

The Product Design and Innovation course is a subtle blend of design skills and engineering skills, material science, bringing the creativity to engineering. This allows you to bring the knowledge you've got from a science and engineering background, but apply it to designing and creating new things. I think for product design, the appeal for our students is whatever you feel like your strengths are, you can kind of lean into that a little bit.

So if you prefer the CAD design and the modelling in there, you can enhance your skills in that. If you like the material science, you can look at that. If you like the creativity and the design side of things, you can focus on your conceptual design work. Particularly for our graduates as well, there's such a diverse range of jobs, whether you want to go on to be a pure product designer, maybe as a consultant you can, if you want to go on to do more engineering, if you want to go into management, innovation. There's so many options available to you and I think that's what our students really get out of our course. This is the product design studio. This is an open access space where students can come in whenever they feel like it. We've got lots of facilities for them, lots of equipment they can use to work on their projects, their designs and their module coursework. We have Octocore computers with really good processing power,

we've got graphics tablets of all kinds, we've got dedicated Wacom Cintiqs that you can draw straight onto the screen, we've got 3Dconnexion Spacemouse kits, the wireless ones, so students can do advanced CAD modelling with those. We primarily use Creo and KeyShot for our course and we've got access to all the software students could possibly need.

So between the second and third years, students can opt to do a placement year. This is something we strongly encourage because employers really favour students who have a year of industry experience. You’ll be working in a course-relevant environment or project. Placement students always come back much stronger, they've got a bunch of industry skills that they can bring back with them,

it really bolsters what they can deliver in the final year and their final year projects always come out that much stronger. I'm really proud to be part of this course and deliver to our students something that they can really get stuck into and it's so good to see what our students go on to do after they graduate. So many of them have got really interesting, exciting careers and it's just fantastic to be part of that development.