Design Products

You will learn through a range of teaching typologies in each unit including briefing, critique, exhibition, group tutorial, individual tutorial, lectures, seminars, demonstrations, workshops, peer reviews and independent study. Each unit will comprise of one or more projects which will develop learning up to the assessment point.

We will formally assess learning once in each unit with a formative and summative assessment. A critique or demonstration will be used for either the formative or summative assessment with asynchronous assessment methods including explanatory short video, desktop display, portfolio, visual presentation, and demonstration used for the other assessment point. The formative assessment will provide you with feedback on the strengths and weaknesses of their work-to-date and recommend strategies for improving learning to enhance the outcome of the summative assessment.

You will submit work in a range of both digital and physical formats depending on the unit project briefs. Examples of submission formats include writing, videos, 2D drawings, sketches and diagrams to test rigs, proof of principle, demonstrators, simulations, prototypes or models.

Design Products offers two routes: a one-year MA and a two-year MDes. Both begin with a common first year in which you develop an increasingly independent design practice through research, experimentation, making and critical reflection.

Throughout the programme, we ask you to think expansively about what a product can be, what it does, and the relationships and systems of which it becomes part. Products may be physical or digital, experimental or speculative; they may operate at the scale of an object, an interaction, a community or a wider system. What connects them is a commitment to exploring how design can engage critically and creatively with contemporary life.

You will work across materials, technologies, methods and contexts, learning through critical experimentation and collaboration. Rather than following a single model of product design, you will be encouraged to develop a distinctive practice of your own: one that is intellectually grounded, technically and creatively ambitious, attentive to its consequences, and capable of evolving as the world around it changes.

The first year moves through three broad stages: locating and expanding your practice; deepening and testing; and bringing this learning together through an independent research project.

Year 1

Term 1: Locate and expand your practice

Your first term is a period of orientation, exploration and experimentation.

In Locating Practice, you will examine where your existing practice sits within a changing design landscape and consider where you want it to go. You will strengthen your research skills, identify areas for technical and intellectual development, and explore ways of connecting research with making. Through projects, proposals, probes and prototypes, you will develop ways to research, frame, test and communicate ideas through design.

Alongside this, Experimental Design encourages you to stretch the boundaries of your practice. Through fast-moving experiments and exploratory projects, you will work with different methods, materials and technologies and learn through iteration, testing and productive failure. Your experiments might be physical, digital, material, computational, biological or performative, and could take the form of products, artefacts, prototypes, interventions or propositions that challenge conventional definitions altogether.

The aim is not simply to produce more ideas, but to become a more adaptive and reflective designer: able to work with uncertainty, recognise unexpected possibilities and choose methods appropriate to the questions you are pursuing.

Term 2: Deepen, connect and test

In the second term, the emphasis moves from expanding possibilities towards developing depth, position and responsibility.

Through Advanced Practice, you will deepen particular areas of your emerging practice and explore how design operates within larger social, technological, cultural and ecological contexts. Working collaboratively, you will use research, experimentation, prototypes and probes to investigate complex questions, engage with stakeholders and external expertise, and test not only whether an idea can work but what it might mean, whom it affects and what responsibilities it creates.

You will encounter knowledge and perspectives from beyond product design and be encouraged to engage with practitioners and disciplines such as engineering, science, architecture, anthropology and the arts. Through this process, you will begin to establish a more confident position of your own while learning how your practice relates to wider communities of knowledge and practice.

Also in Term 2, a choice of elective units will allow you to shape your own learning journey. You will have the opportunity to work alongside students from other programmes, bringing your practice into dialogue with the creative approaches of your peers. This could either be through tackling ‘wicked’ design problems from a range of different perspectives, by collaborating on themed interdisciplinary projects, or by exploring how mutual exchanges of ideas and interpretations can foster a socially engaged practice. A full list of elective options will be published in 2027.

By the end of the term, the different strands of the year begin to converge: the questions you care about, the methods you have developed, the materials and technologies you work with, and the kind of designer you are becoming.

Term 3: Bring your practice together

The Independent Research Project (IRP) is the culmination of the first year.

Here, you take increasing ownership of an ambitious project that brings together the research, experimentation, making and critical thinking developed throughout the programme. Rather than responding to a tightly prescribed brief, you define and pursue a design question of your own and determine the methods, collaborations and forms through which it can best be explored.

The mode of learning consequently shifts towards supervision and independent practice. You will spend much of your time developing and making your work, supported by strategic academic supervision and negotiated technical support.

The IRP is an opportunity to demonstrate the position that drives your practice: what you believe design can contribute, how your work relates to contemporary practice, and what new territory your project might open.

Your project culminates in public presentation and exhibition, creating an opportunity to communicate your work, encounter responses to it and reflect on what you have learned.

For MA students, this completes an intensive 45-week programme and provides a foundation from which to take your developing practice into professional, entrepreneurial, research or further creative contexts.

Year 2

From project to sustained practice

For students taking the two-year MDes route, Year 2 creates time and space to take the questions, practices and ambitions developed during the first year significantly further.

Where Year 1 culminates in an independent project, Year 2 asks a different question: how might that work develop into a sustained practice capable of operating in the world?

You will extend the direction established through your Independent Research Project, building deeper expertise, relationships and experience within the contexts relevant to your work. Depending on your practice, these might include industry and manufacturing, research, cultural organisations, communities, emerging technologies, entrepreneurship or other professional and public contexts.

In the second year, the emphasis shifts from developing an individual project, towards understanding the ecology required to sustain a practice: the collaborators, stakeholders, resources, knowledge, audiences and forms of value that allow ideas to develop beyond the College.

Term 4: Build the conditions for practice

Through Professional Development & Contextual Framing, you will explore the professional and wider context in which your practice could develop.

You will identify and build relationships with relevant collaborators, organisations, clients, stakeholders, facilities and other forms of expertise, learning to negotiate the practical conditions through which ambitious design work becomes possible.

Professional development here is understood broadly. For some students this may involve establishing a studio or commercial proposition; for others it may mean developing a research-led, socially engaged, technological or collaborative practice.

The aim is to move beyond thinking about a project in isolation and begin building the network of relationships through which your practice can have agency and impact.

Terms 5 and 6: Develop and test a sustained practice

During the MDes Major Project, you will put this developing practice into action.

Working increasingly beyond the immediate environment of the programme, you will draw upon the relationships and contexts established during the previous term to develop, test and refine your work. You will learn through the realities of collaboration and professional engagement: negotiating different interests, responding to constraints, adapting your ideas and understanding how value is created and communicated within your chosen field.

Success is not defined simply by establishing a fully sustainable practice within the year. The emphasis is also on the learning and development involved in trying to make a practice viable – understanding what works, what changes when ideas encounter real contexts, and how your practice might continue to evolve beyond the RCA.

The two-year MDes is delivered over 90 weeks, comprising 45 weeks of study in each year.