Download the course booklet to find out more about Lancaster University, how we teach Design and what you'll study as a Design student.
Overview
Top reasons to study with us
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2nd for Product Design
The Guardian University Guide (2024)
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4th for Art and Design
The Times and Sunday Times Good University Guide (2024)
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6th for Graduate Prospects (joint)
The Times and Sunday Times Good University Guide (2024)
Why Lancaster?
- Help to build a better world by applying creative design practice to a diverse range of important issues
- Learn processes such as 3D printing and laser-cutting and use industry standard software like Adobe Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator
- Add real world experience to your CV by working on live briefs, including a group consultancy project
- Become a graduate in demand, from the more traditional design jobs to new and emerging roles
- Benefit from close links to ImaginationLancaster, our globally renowned design research lab
Question what design actually is and what your ideas can achieve. Studying at Lancaster, you’ll search for ways design can solve cultural, social and environmental problems. Our expansive degree provides you with a broad set of skills and a keen understanding of how design can be applied to create positive change across varied contexts.
Think differently
Our students learn to conduct design research and conceptualise physical solutions. You’ll investigate a range of areas in which design plays a critically important role, such as such as environmental sustainability, healthier lifestyles, urban wellbeing and ethical digital futures.
Develop transferable problem-solving skills and learn how to work effectively as part of a design team. By the time you graduate, you’ll be able to research, ideate, prototype, visualise, iterate and present your design work to a professional standard.
We support you to develop your portfolio and build professional contacts throughout your degree. We organise for design professionals to come and talk about design, and many of our students choose to do a summer internship with a design consultancy, agency or within a large organisation.
Leading design research
You will be taught by staff from ImaginationLancaster, a globally renowned design research lab – and one of the largest in the world. Our teaching staff work on a diverse array of design projects and are at the cutting edge of advancing the theory and practice of design.
Flexibility
In the first year, there is a focus on increasing your knowledge and skills in your major degree subject. You will also have the option to complement your degree studies with a module in a 'minor subject'. Please contact the department for further details.
Careers
Many different types of organisations are increasingly recognising the value that graduates with a creative imagination and broad-ranging design skills can bring. Our graduates shine, as they are able to articulate how design can bring value to an organisation and are capable of pursuing a wide range of design-related careers such as:
- User experience designer
- Design researcher
- Design ethnographer
- Graphic designer
- Interaction designer
- Brand manager
- Design facilitator
- Service designer
- Design consultant
Some of our graduates have gone on to work in large organisations as design researchers, design facilitators and brand innovation consultants whilst others have begun their careers in more traditional roles such as graphic design and multimedia design. We also have a strong track record of graduates going on to study postgraduate courses at prestigious institutions.
Our Careers and Employability Service will be on hand to offer tailored advice and guidance throughout your journey, and you’ll also receive careers support on a departmental level.
Lancaster University is dedicated to ensuring that you gain a highly reputable degree. We are also dedicated to ensuring that you graduate with relevant life and work-based skills. We are unique in that every student is eligible to participate in The Lancaster Award, which offers you the opportunity to complete activities such as work experience, employability/career development, campus community and social development.
Visit our Employability section for full details.
Entry requirements
Grade Requirements
A Level ABB
IELTS 6.5 overall with at least 5.5 in each component. For other English language qualifications we accept, please see our English language requirements webpages.
Other Qualifications
International Baccalaureate 32 points overall with 16 points from the best 3 Higher Level subjects
BTEC Distinction, Distinction, Merit
We welcome applications from students with a range of alternative UK and international qualifications, including combinations of qualification. Further guidance on admission to the University, including other qualifications that we accept, frequently asked questions and information on applying, can be found on our general admissions webpages.
Contact Admissions Team + 44 (0) 1524 592028 or via ugadmissions@lancaster.ac.uk
International foundation programmes
Delivered in partnership with INTO Lancaster University, our one-year tailored foundation pathways are designed to improve your subject knowledge and English language skills to the level required by a range of Lancaster University degrees. Visit the INTO Lancaster University website for more details and a list of eligible degrees you can progress onto.
Contextual admissions
Contextual admissions could help you gain a place at university if you have faced additional challenges during your education which might have impacted your results. Visit our contextual admissions page to find out about how this works and whether you could be eligible.
Course structure
Lancaster University offers a range of programmes, some of which follow a structured study programme, and some which offer the chance for you to devise a more flexible programme to complement your main specialism.
Information contained on the website with respect to modules is correct at the time of publication, and the University will make every reasonable effort to offer modules as advertised. In some cases changes may be necessary and may result in some combinations being unavailable, for example as a result of student feedback, timetabling, Professional Statutory and Regulatory Bodies' (PSRB) requirements, staff changes and new research. Not all optional modules are available every year.
Core
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Design Issues
Through a combination of design practice and lectures, this module introduces and explores design in a broad sense, emphasising design as an engine of innovation and a force for social good. You will develop a range of key design skills that include developing your ability to critically evaluate design, conduct design research, generate multiple ideas, prototype and iterate physical and digital designs, use a range of industry standard design software, visualise your ideas creatively, collaborate effectively and present your design work in an engaging manner. This module draws from a range of staff from ImaginationLancaster to expose you to cutting-edge concepts in design so that you can learn about the fundamental and transformative role that design plays in addressing a range of contemporary issues. During this module, you will work on both group and individual projects that enable you to develop both your practical designing skills as well as your awareness of how design affects and can address personal, social and environmental wellbeing.
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Fundamentals: Contemporary Arts and Design
This module will introduce you to key methods, tools and critical concepts used by academics to understand a broad range of creative work, its discussion and practice historically and today. Through a combination of lectures and seminars, you are encouraged to think of yourself as a "creative critic" who uses intelligent observations about the creative world to inform your own practice of writing and making.
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Fundamentals: Design Studio (part 1)
This practical studio module is designed to help you face the industry challenges of the future. The module is a mix of Human-Centred Design, Graphic Design, User Interactions and Experience (UI/UX). You will be introduced to various analogue and digital techniques that enable you to develop responses based on changing industry briefs rooted in a deep understanding of user needs. Upon successfully completing this module, your portfolio will demonstrate your knowledge of human-centred design and your ability to progress research into viable and meaningful design solutions.
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Fundamentals: Design Studio (part 2)
This practical studio module builds upon Fundamentals: Design Studio (part 1) by encouraging you to further develop your skills in human-centred design, prototyping and visualisation. You will apply appropriate visualisation tools and techniques to produce a portfolio and prototype incorporating user research, concept development, iteration, and relevant theoretical sources.
Core
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Critical Reflections in Creative Arts
Critical Reflections explores a number of key interdisciplinary philosophical and cultural theories and concepts such as: Aesthetics, Formalism, Phenomenology, Semiotics, Structuralism, Deconstruction, Class, Society, Feminism, Queer Theory and Gender, Difference and Postcolonialism. This will enable you to analyse, engage with, and reflect upon artworks in your own discipline. It also allows you to establish a common set of concepts which can be shared by students from different LICA subjects including Design, Film, Fine Art and Theatre; with ideas and examples specifically tailored towards these disciplines.
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Design Studio: Materials
This practical studio module helps you develop practical digital making skills using a range of different materials through experimentation and the development of design responses to particular problems. This module is taught though a series of design exercises including laser cutting, 3D scanning, 3D design and printing, and simple electronics with Arduino. These exercises enable you to develop understanding of how materials and technology inform and influence the development of design artefacts and how construction methods and associated technologies constrain and support the development of artefacts, both physical and digital in nature. This module allows you to consider how a specific design problem may be explored through a particular lens and/or given constraints.
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Design Studio: People
This practical studio module focuses on people as being both the recipients and potential creators of design. You will learn how to use methods and tools that enable you to gain insight into the diversity of user groups (the individual, community, young, old, etc.) that may be both designed for and with. You will develop and apply practical design skills such as concept development, creative problem solving and visualisation. You will develop a deep awareness about the user experience by conducting primary and secondary research that includes gaining empathy with potential users, prototyping, testing and iterating potential design solutions. This module allows you to develop a portfolio piece that demonstrates your ability to conduct robust user research and transform that research into a design solution that can generate positive user experiences as well as help tackle some of the big issues facing society.
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Design Visualisation
This practical studio module aims to develop your skills in a range of approaches and software tools for designing new and imaginative 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional visualisations. Through design studios and software labs, you will learn about the ways in which designers creatively use visualisation tools and visual thinking to develop their ideas, explore possible interventions and communicate possible futures to different audiences. You will develop competencies in a range of 2-dimensional approaches that draw on theory and techniques from graphic design and information design and you will build on this foundation to develop competencies in visualising 3-dimensional objects and spaces that draw on architectural and product design principles. The module will encourage you to develop an iterative and disruptive approach to generating visualisations, which actively engage with contemporary design issues and contexts.
Optional
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Design Interactions
This module introduces you to principles and processes for designing digitally interactive products, services and systems, which are applicable to a wide variety of scenarios. You will have the opportunity to gain a historical and theoretical understanding of designing for interaction, while also being encouraged to develop your practical digital interaction design skills. You will explore how to use paper-based and digital software tools to prototype novel interactions and iteratively evaluate them with potential audiences. The aim is to identify strengths and weaknesses that can help improve both your prototypes and your process. With emphasis on responsible interactions, you will explore how to creatively and critically design interactions that seek to benefit people and the planet.
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Design Management
This module provides an overview of the knowledge and expertise design management brings to organisations. Design Management refers to a broad range of theories, methods and practices by which an organisation can employ design principles, activities and methods for internal or external purposes. This module introduces past, present, and emerging practices, methods and principles of Design Management. Through lectures and seminars, you will develop an appreciation of the contribution of Design Management for strategy, product development and customer relationships. This module prepares you to work successfully with designers on strategic design issues.
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What Is The Contemporary?
This module aims to give students a grounding in “the contemporary” as a key critical concept used in artistic discourses, and provide a number of ways that students can explore and articulate their own contemporaneity. In conversation with cutting edge ideas from art, science, technology and popular culture, the module will enable participants to discuss and identify what they are contemporaries of, how they relate to their own time as artists, citizens and critical writers and what this necessitates in their own practices.
Students will engage in critical discussion of key terms used to define the current moment, such as Anthropocene, Singularity, Post-Truth, and Globalisation, as well as understanding how particular technologies and phenomena, such as distributed and decentralised networks, virtual reality, artificial intelligence and genetic engineering are reshaping the contexts in which the arts are made. These topics are explored through lectures and seminar discussions in which students are encouraged to produce and define their own position and modes for articulating what makes them contemporary.
The module is designed for creative students who wish to use writing and material practice to explore their own relationship to the ecologies, politics, trends, technologies, and aesthetics that typify our experience of the world today.
Core
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Placement Year Work-Based Learning
You will spend this year working in a graduate-level placement role. This is an opportunity to gain experience in an industry or sector that you might be considering working in once you graduate.
Our Careers and Placements Team will support you during your placement with online contact and learning resources.
You will undertake a work-based learning module during your placement year which will enable you to reflect on the value of the placement experience and to consider what impact it has on your future career plans.
Core
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Design Consultancy
This module allows you to work in a team and undertake a practical design consultancy project with a real-world client. You will learn what Design Consultancy is and how to become a design consultant. Throughout this project, you will work closely with your client, teammates and tutors to address some of the challenges your client is facing by designing a product or service based on robust design research. Projects vary in nature since they respond to the client's needs but may take the form of a design audit, a new product development, design guidelines, brand positioning/strategy or UX research. Your project will be defined through a negotiation between you and your client that responds to the client's needs and aligns with your team's abilities. During your design consultancy project, you will develop skills in problem definition, data collection and analysis, design conceptualisation, visualisation or making, presentation and report writing. You will also gain professional experience that can help you to develop your employability skills. The Design Consultancy module develops your ability to manage the realities and complexities of design research problems whilst developing your teamwork skills and building your confidence in working directly with clients.
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Design Studio: Contexts
This practical studio module considers contemporary issues (ecological sustainability, health and wellbeing) or ‘wicked problems’ through the exploration of a specific context (space, place or practice). Typically, this is an intensive design project that lasts for ten weeks. You will develop skills in critically evaluating a particular context to inform the development of appropriate design responses, which you will visualise to a professional standard. You will conduct design research and apply practical design skills that respond to the findings of your contextual analysis. Your portfolio piece will demonstrate your ability to understand not only the opportunities and constraints presented by a particular context but also the ways in which design interventions may affect that context.
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Design Studio: Things
This Speculative Design studio helps develop your ability to think critically by considering how emerging technologies might affect our lives in the future. You will develop a world-building approach to consider the potential futures of a chosen emerging technology (e.g. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, Robots, Diamond Batteries, Biomimetic Materials, etc.) by creating a range of 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional artefacts that help to domesticate and concretise such a future. In doing this, you will be able to explore and critically evaluate the potential societal implications of particular futures based on current weak signals in the present - and you will learn how to practically represent your vision for the future to an external audience in a manner that is both plausible and engaging. This module therefore results in a portfolio piece that demonstrates critical, imaginative and futures-focused thinking and designing.
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Dissertation
This module allows you to undertake a major independent research project on a topic of your choice, presented in the form of a dissertation or a practice-based project and an essay. The module is taught through lectures focused on research skills and one-to-one supervision. Upon completion, you will be able to demonstrate your ability to undertake a major project that includes conducting research, engaging in a sustained critical analysis of relevant texts, building an argument and applying this to practice.
Optional
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Advanced Design Interactions
This optional module provides advanced, theoretical perspectives for design interactions, building upon the general framework for designing interactive products and systems, introduced in the second year Design Interactions module. You will extend your knowledge and understanding of the theory, research and practice of design interactions into specialised areas, which may include human-computer, human-human, human-place and human-system interactions. Advanced Design Interactions allows you to consider the role that design plays in these different types of interactions, and introduces you to specific methods or ways that you might research design interactions that are interesting to you. This module draws directly from the research expertise of staff in ImaginationLancaster, our globally recognised design research lab, so that you are exposed to cutting-edge concepts in these fields. As such, Advanced Design Interactions provides you with an understanding of some of the most up-to-date issues and challenges facing those who design interactions today. The module also gives you the opportunity to design a research project or interaction, which further gives you some skills that will be helpful if you wish to pursue design research as a graduate.
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Innovation and Design
This module explores the complex relationship between innovation and design with a particular emphasis on the need for successful design to engage with networks of innovation that include a broad range of stakeholders. You will develop your understanding of innovation as a discipline, and identify and evaluate some of the different modes of innovation. This module also allows you to explore practically the relationship between innovation and design and develop design concepts that employ ‘innovation’ thinking.
Fees and funding
We set our fees on an annual basis and the 2025/26 entry fees have not yet been set.
As a guide, our fees in 2024/25 were:
Home | International |
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£9,250 | £23,750 |
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Additional costs
There may be extra costs related to your course for items such as books, stationery, printing, photocopying, binding and general subsistence on trips and visits. Following graduation, you may need to pay a subscription to a professional body for some chosen careers.
Specific additional costs for studying at Lancaster are listed below.
College fees
Lancaster is proud to be one of only a handful of UK universities to have a collegiate system. Every student belongs to a college, and all students pay a small college membership fee which supports the running of college events and activities. Students on some distance-learning courses are not liable to pay a college fee.
For students starting in 2023 and 2024, the fee is £40 for undergraduates and research students and £15 for students on one-year courses. Fees for students starting in 2025 have not yet been set.
Computer equipment and internet access
To support your studies, you will also require access to a computer, along with reliable internet access. You will be able to access a range of software and services from a Windows, Mac, Chromebook or Linux device. For certain degree programmes, you may need a specific device, or we may provide you with a laptop and appropriate software - details of which will be available on relevant programme pages. A dedicated IT support helpdesk is available in the event of any problems.
The University provides limited financial support to assist students who do not have the required IT equipment or broadband support in place.
Study abroad courses
In addition to travel and accommodation costs, while you are studying abroad, you will need to have a passport and, depending on the country, there may be other costs such as travel documents (e.g. VISA or work permit) and any tests and vaccines that are required at the time of travel. Some countries may require proof of funds.
Placement and industry year courses
In addition to possible commuting costs during your placement, you may need to buy clothing that is suitable for your workplace and you may have accommodation costs. Depending on the employer and your job, you may have other costs such as copies of personal documents required by your employer for example.
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What is my fee status?
The fee that you pay will depend on whether you are considered to be a home or international student. Read more about how we assign your fee status.
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Fees in subsequent years
Home fees are subject to annual review, and may be liable to rise each year in line with UK government policy. International fees (including EU) are reviewed annually and are not fixed for the duration of your studies. Read more about fees in subsequent years.
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Fees for study abroad and work placements
We will charge tuition fees to Home undergraduate students on full-year study abroad/work placements in line with the maximum amounts permitted by the Department for Education. The current maximum levels are:
- Students studying abroad for a year: 15% of the standard tuition fee
- Students taking a work placement for a year: 20% of the standard tuition fee
International students on full-year study abroad/work placements will be charged the same percentages as the standard International fee.
Please note that the maximum levels chargeable in future years may be subject to changes in Government policy.
Scholarships and bursaries
Details of our scholarships and bursaries for students starting in 2025 are not yet available. You can use our scholarships for 2024-entry applicants as guidance.
Similar courses
Important information
The information on this site relates primarily to 2025/2026 entry to the University and every effort has been taken to ensure the information is correct at the time of publication.
The University will use all reasonable effort to deliver the courses as described, but the University reserves the right to make changes to advertised courses. In exceptional circumstances that are beyond the University’s reasonable control (Force Majeure Events), we may need to amend the programmes and provision advertised. In this event, the University will take reasonable steps to minimise the disruption to your studies. If a course is withdrawn or if there are any fundamental changes to your course, we will give you reasonable notice and you will be entitled to request that you are considered for an alternative course or withdraw your application. You are advised to revisit our website for up-to-date course information before you submit your application.
More information on limits to the University’s liability can be found in our legal information.
Our Students’ Charter
We believe in the importance of a strong and productive partnership between our students and staff. In order to ensure your time at Lancaster is a positive experience we have worked with the Students’ Union to articulate this relationship and the standards to which the University and its students aspire. View our Charter and other policies.
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