Design - integrated
Design as a discipline is ultimately about solving problems in ways that are both functional and compelling. At its best, design makes complex things accessible, gives useful objects beauty, and ensures that the things people interact with every day work as well as they look. Integrated design brings together the thinking and making skills needed to work across physical and digital products, combining aesthetic sensibility with engineering awareness, user research with prototyping, and commercial understanding with the ability to innovate.
At Brunel you will study this four-year full-time programme, developing both your creative abilities and your technical skills in the context of real-world product and interaction design. You will learn to take ideas from initial concept through research, development and prototyping to a finished outcome, building the commercial awareness that distinguishes a professional designer from a student one. The programme addresses both physical and digital products, training you to think about how things are made, how users interact with them, and what it takes for a design to succeed in a competitive market.
Brunel has a strong tradition of connecting design education with industry, and across four years you will develop a portfolio that demonstrates your range and depth.
Design graduates from a programme of this kind are well positioned for careers in product design, interaction design, user experience design, industrial design, and innovation consulting. Graduates work for manufacturers, technology companies, design consultancies, consumer goods businesses, and in the public sector on service design and design for social good. Many also pursue freelance and entrepreneurial routes, using the combination of creative confidence and commercial awareness the programme develops.
Postgraduate study in design, human-computer interaction, sustainable design or innovation management is a natural route for those wishing to specialise or to move into research and academia.