Product Design (with Foundation Year) FT

Your Foundation Year will introduce you to the skills you’ll need to prepare you for your future studies. From perfecting freehand drawing and sketchbook use to learning about materials and fabrication, you’ll gain practical experience through real-world briefs and develop your confidence in presenting your ideas.

Product designers create the products, services and experiences that we use in our daily life. If you are creative and care about shaping our future relationships with artefacts and technology, then product design offers you a doorway to an exciting, ever evolving discipline that shapes people’s lives for the better.

Our teachers don’t just teach. They’re collaborators, constantly encouraging you to develop your own unique design style. We’ll plug you into the industry from day one; you’ll be pushing live briefs to the edge of your imagination as you explore the needs of users, markets, and manufacturers. You’ll create with your mind, your hands, and cutting-edge software.

You’ll learn how designers guide projects as visionaries and leaders, and as the glue between specialists. You’ll be part of a studio culture that builds confidence through community, developing your work from preliminary sketches to fully functioning prototypes. Through placements, competitions and exhibitions, you’ll have the chance to meet and impress some of the biggest names in the game.

We’ve built this course in consultation with product design’s most influential employers. We know what they want, and that’s what we teach: with hard work and creative bravery, you could be following our global network of alumni to the likes of Adidas, Puma, Sony, Speedo, the BBC, Habitat, MADE.COM, and Matter.

Key Features

• Professional Accreditation | Our course is accredited by the Chartered Society of Designers (CSD), recognising the quality and relevance of our course content. - It also means you can become a student member of the CSD for free whilst studying.

• Live Projects | You’ll work on live project briefs with real industry clients. We’ve already welcomed the likes of Nestlé, PepsiCo, W'innovate, Herman Miller and Speedo onto the course, and that list of big-time industry partners is growing all the time.

• Exhibitions and Shows | Exhibit and get yourself noticed! Events like New Designers and NTU’s annual Degree Show are annual fixtures in the product design calendar, and our grads have won big at external competitions like the Starpack Awards and Student Design Innovation Awards.

Key Statistics

• Top 15 Ranking | NTU is ranked Top 15 for Art & Design (Complete University Guide 2025).

• Top 2 Ranking | NTU is the 2nd most sustainable university in the world (UI GreenMetric World University Rankings 2024).

Throughout the course, modules will cover a variety of subjects, a few examples include: Exploring Design, Materials and Making, Introduction to Design, Design for Markets, Users & Manufacture, Advanced Design Communications, Exploring Design Futures and Commercial Project. To view the full list of modules, visit the course page: https://www.ntu.ac.uk/course/architecture-design-and-the-built-environment/ug/product-design-with-foundation-year