Design (Placement Year)

Design prepares you to tackle the complex challenges of today’s world by developing versatile skills in graphics, products, and user experience (UX/UI). You’ll learn to solve problems with creativity, design research, and professional visualisation techniques. Taught by experts from our world-class design research lab, this programme equips you for a career in design agencies, tech companies, healthcare, education, public services, and beyond — wherever innovation is needed.

Why Lancaster?

• Develop a future-focused, adaptable, and agile skill set through a broad design curriculum that enables you to consider how design can address complex challenges

• Take a course that helps you become a socially and environmentally responsible designer

• Benefit from a research-driven approach to teaching, learning from expert designers and practitioners who push the boundaries of design

• Gain valuable industry experience through working on live briefs with real-world clients

• Take advantage of our close links with globally renowned design research lab, ImaginationLancaster

Visualise. Experiment. Create.
At Lancaster, we view design as a way of understanding the world, as a creative process that can address any problem, and contribute to creating a better society. You will work on projects that help you put this view into practice.

Our carefully curated curriculum nurtures creative experimentation, intellectual inquiry, adaptability, critical thinking and ethical awareness as well as emphasising the importance of developing design solutions that are rooted in robust design research.

You will learn how to conduct design research using a broad range of design methods, such as sketchbooks, storyboarding, design workshops, prototyping, journey mapping, empathy mapping, IDEO cards, and many more, allowing you to translate that research into exciting, relevant design solutions visualised to industry standard. This approach expands your horizons whilst fostering adaptability as it enables you to work on a range of projects spanning varied topics such as, environmental and social sustainability, healthier lifestyles, urban wellbeing, and digital futures.

Our research-driven approach to design allows you to gain skills not only in creating innovative design solutions but also in design processes, methods, and tools, as well as identifying problems and opportunities that would benefit from design – a skill valued by many different employers.

Explore what interests you
You will have the opportunity to explore a wide range of topics during your time at Lancaster, giving you the flexibility to dive deeper into the design methods and issues that interest you most. Your final year project will showcase a wide range of innovative and impactful ideas.

Our broad Design curriculum will allow you to develop an adaptable, futures-focused mindset, with transferable skills that will enable you to stand out in the design industry.

Discover your design identity
Throughout your degree, you will be encouraged to explore and develop your own design identity and values. By doing this, you will graduate with a strong sense of where you want to take your design career, and you will develop your portfolio to reflect this.

Your Placement Year
You'll spend your third year in a paid, graduate-level position, where you’ll work for between nine and twelve months in the type of role that you might be considering for after you graduate. Our Careers and Placements Team will help you to secure a suitable placement with expert advice and resources, such as creating an effective CV, and tips for applications and interviews. If you are unsuccessful in securing a suitable placement for your third year, you will be able to transfer to the equivalent non-placement degree scheme and continue with your studies at Lancaster, finishing your degree after your third year.