Product Design

Please check the Sheffield Hallam University website for the latest information.

Course Summary

- Learn the creative, practical and digital skills needed to become a professional product or service designer

- Put learning into practice with leading product design brands and the opportunity to take a placement year

- Collaborate with practising designers with a diverse range of experience and professional networks

- Challenge convention as you learn how to contribute to a more sustainable future

This course prepares you for an exciting career as a globally minded product or service designer. Through real-world projects and exploration of new materials and processes and systems, you’ll be equipped to identify and respond empathetically, sustainably, and collaboratively to creative opportunities and challenges.

This course also allows you to specialise in and receive a different named award – Product Design (Service Innovation) – through focused project work in your final year.

Creative UK membership

We are members of Creative UK, which means our art and design students are also members until they graduate. With 10,000 members in its network, Creative UK represents, champions and supports the UK’s creative industries, advocating on the issues that matter the most to creative communities.

How you learn

All our courses are designed around a set of key principles based on engaging you with the world, collaborating with others, challenging you to think in new ways, and providing you with a supportive environment in which you can thrive.

Based in our bespoke studios, workshops, and digital spaces, you’ll become part of a dynamic and collaborative learning community. Together, you’ll undertake creative adventures, explore possibilities, and challenge conventions.

You’ll engage with live creative design projects supported by external clients and industry professionals – and you’ll have opportunities to enter national and international design competitions.

Key themes

This course focuses on insight-driven design for future-facing products, services and experiences. We recognise the responsibility we have as creators and agents for environmental sustainability. You’ll learn to be globally-minded designers, seeking out future challenges, challenging convention and embracing creative risks.

In our studio-based collaborative learning community, you’ll explore both the feasible and the conceptual, the highly technical to the hand-made – from individual products to product-service systems. You’ll gain the skills to identify and respond to future needs and opportunities using industry-standard design strategies and digital technologies. Through engaging design projects, you’ll gain key skills, techniques and principles – such as design for sustainable manufacture, new and emerging digital technologies, creative research methods, and principles of colour, material and finish.

As the course progresses, you’ll gain a deeper understanding of the ecological, social and economic factors that all designers must consider when designing for diverse audiences and contexts.

In the final year you’ll develop your own insight-driven, individual creative design project/s closely aligned to your own interests, skills and personal career aspirations.

Course support

Throughout your learning journey, you’ll experience a range of dedicated personal, academic and career development support, such as:

- Access to our Skills Centre with one-to-ones and online resources to help with planning and structuring your assignments

- Access to office and studio space, expert workshops, freelancing opportunities and a vast business network to tap into

- Industry-specific employability activities and careers support for up to five years after you graduate