Towards a framework of the sub-disciplines of product design to enable appropriate course selection for prospective students

Abstract

Variants of the discipline most commonly known as Product Design are taught in over 80 undergraduate degrees at over 50 universities in the UK. There is an incredibly wide scope between the types of products, teaching content and approach to designing products between them due to the diversity of products required and/or desired by consumers. Some courses are closer to Applied Arts and the Crafts, and others are closer to Engineering and the embodiment of new technology, with the rest lying somewhere between those two extents. However, the majority of courses in the UK use the increasingly nondescript title of Product Design which does not enable students to easily differentiate between them by course title alone. The use of different course designations (e.g. BA/BDes/BSc/BEng) are used by many universities to add more clarity to the priorities and approach of their course/s but there is no agreed framework which is in use that ensures consistency in the use of different designations between universities. Furthermore, where variants of the title Product Design are used, they are also used inconsistently; even, in the case of Industrial Design, being at opposite ends of the aforementioned scale. These inconsistencies and contradictions add unnecessary complication for prospective students when seeking a higher education course on which to study. A framework of designations and degree titles could enable prospective students to more effectively filter courses to those which better align with their qualifications, abilities and interests, and simplify things for them at what can be an already unsettling and stressful time.