MA Design Management

Do you want to be a design thinker? Is your goal to use a design strategy to transform businesses, cultures, and lives? Alternatively, do you want to develop your own design business? If your answer is yes, then this course is for you!

This course invites designers and non-designers to apply design thinking and business-speak to create innovative and purposeful outcomes. On this course, you sharpen your strategic edge through expanding your entrepreneurial and business capabilities. If you are a non-designer, you learn to be a creative thinker.

The postgraduate course is available as a full time (1 year), part-time (2 years), and via ‘workbased learning’ (2 years) while you remain employed.

You bring the knowledge from your past education and practice, combine them with the subject knowledge of design management, and create solutions that are not just aesthetically pleasing but also functional, viable, and purposeful. The course brings excellent networking opportunities for you to facilitate knowledge building and collaborative learning.

On this postgraduate course, we teach you the interdisciplinary issues that design managers work with, such as business, marketing, technology, and art. Immersed in practice, you acquire the skills and the confidence to manage and lead a project. You are encouraged to push the boundaries and to put forward new, improved ideas that are innovative and purposeful.

Design thinking, design strategy, creativity, research, and problem solving are applied extensively to all the modules. You undertake projects individually and in a team, where you learn communication, management, and interpersonal skills. You work with industry partners with the utmost professionalism. You pursue an industry-based inquiry, which may be a placement. And, you acquire and apply people management, client management, and project management tactics while working on industry projects and teams.

With an MA in Design Management, you are acquiring skills that empower you to apply to jobs in a diverse range of fields, and you can pursue further research by conducting a Ph.D.

Enhancing employability skills

Many of our graduates are established designers working in architecture, fashion, graphics, interiors, jewellery, media, product, service, and design-related businesses. Design Management graduates have been successful in establishing and running their businesses. And, many have jobs in companies that are not in the field of design but require Design Managers to instil more human-centred approaches and processes in the business.

Career opportunities are found in design and brand consultancies, in-house design and marketing departments, and innovation teams. Graduates of this course hold job titles such as user researcher, UX designer, UI designer, senior designers, design managers, strategic designer, project and account managers, buyers, and marketing communication managers.