Product Design with Foundation Year

If you don't meet the entry requirements for our BA (Hons) course, or you’d like extra preparation before starting degree-level study, we recommend you join the foundation year – which has been designed to encourage exploration and experimentation.

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.

How you learn

At Sheffield Hallam, all our courses are designed to engage you with the world and challenge you to think in new ways. You’ll get to collaborate with others, and you’ll be taught in a supportive environment where you can thrive.

This foundation course brings together students across all our art and design courses as one creative community. You’ll work and learn together in a dedicated studio space and have access to our top-class facilities.

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.

We take a holistic and person-centred approach to assessment to support your creative growth while respecting the diverse ways people learn.

Key themes

Your foundation year will help you get to grips with University life as you study alongside a creative community of Art and Design students. Expect to be hands-on in the studio, learning through doing as you explore the creative process with collaborative projects, workshops and field trips.

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.