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Toys, tools, technology, transport these are just a few of the sectors in which we design and develop new product concepts. What would you like to create? More importantly, what will consumers want? Even more importantly, what does society need? The MA Product Design course at The Cass encourages you to explore, experiment and deepen your knowledge of the design process in order to develop innovative, worthwhile, desirable and sustainable new product designs.
You will be required to:
* Identify a viable field of personal interest through research and creative thinking and exploration
* Plan and execute an appropriate research programme
* Synthesize your research and design through the production of a design based and theoretically grounded furniture project outcome
* Build a career-ready portfolio of work to help you gain employment or commissions
Career opportunities
The UK's leading careers website, prospects.ac.uk, states that over 50% of people in the design sector work in London. Located in the creative hub of the East End, the Cass offers excellent opportunities for students and professionals to showcase cutting-edge design within related industries and venues. Through work placement and live projects, you will create design projects that are commercially and creatively relevant to global consumer markets.
Typical career opportunities include consultant designers, CEOs, in-house designers in manufacturing companies, bespoke designers within established product design companies, designers and/or makers of bespoke products, production facility managers/consultants, freelance designers for; multinational corporations, corporate/domestic clients, limited/batch/mass production markets within IDE, industrial design, engineering design, product design, design management and CRD.
This is an advanced postgraduate course where you can direct your interests through a choice of Studio programmes. The Studio projects will be founded on a deep level of design research and questioning; how historical precedent informs, how markets evolve, how contemporary practice develops and how useful technologies emerge.
In parallel with theoretical research, you will generate, communicate and evaluate all kinds of innovative ideas and concepts for future products and services. You will discover what design research methods will generate the widest range of proposals for testing, how best to inform the user and producer of what you have in mind and how best to evaluate concepts that exist in virtual form only.
Realisation of your new product follows - moving from 'art to part', from concept to production. Sketch models are likely to precede the final design decisions. The resulting forms will be carefully resolved, materials assigned to components, production processes specified. Final models and prototypes will evolve and time will be tight for final testing and evaluation. Then the product will be revealed to peers and public in a Studio exhibition or at the Major Project exhibition at the end of the course.
Assessment
The course structure comprises a range of modules, but the main vehicle for learning is a series of projects, often with external partners, that change annually. Projects are undertaken within one of a number of design Studios that set a theme for the design work over the academic year, very like a commercial practice. Each Studio runs a number of projects, which offer you a choice of an extraordinary range of research interests, product types, materials, processes, and cultural and theoretical contexts. Each Studio is lead by an experienced designer/tutor who sets a specific agenda. They all share a commitment to contemporary design and its global and local contexts, a passion for the broad sweep of current art and design thinking, and a desire to test the premises of what product design is, or can be, in the 21st Century both practically and theoretically.
Students completing the MA undertake a substantial personal project based upon their design and research project work in the design studio, or emerging from one of the thematic areas or a combination of fields. You will select an area of study, undertake appropriate research, develop your work through investigative processes, formulate your own argument or theoretical position, and produce an independent and coherent body of work. The major project challenges you to sustain a substantial and serious study of a topic or field of interest which will test your creative ambition through your control of its direction and substance within a framework of critical reflection, supported by and measured against an established area of scholarship.
The Major Project exhibition, towards the end of the course, is a leading event in the annual London Design Festival. Previous exhibitions have helped to launch our post-graduate designers into a wide range of successful careers - from independent design consultancies in London, to the large, in-house design departments of manufacturing organisations.
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