#MDXPD Product Design 2024

The 2023-24 has been an exciting, creative and productive time for the BA and BEng students and staff, but the broader landscape of Higher Education we sit within has become increasingly uncertain.

Big changes and impacts from Brexit, demographic shifts and directions in government policy over the last decade and a half have left many universities struggling, with course closures and staff redundancies. These changes have the potential to cause societal division, embed disadvantage and more broadly negatively impact the UK’s standing as one of the world-leading providers of Higher Education. The upcoming academic year will start to reveal the real impacts of the choices now being made. Alongside these societal and institutional level challenges, there has been an ongoing sector specific challenge for Design and Technology education, impacting creative sector Higher Education and industry. The Design Council ‘A Blueprint for Renewal Design and Technology Education’ Report in June 2024 discusses the background and proposes action to rectify this: “D&T is a subject in critical decline – it is a microcosm of wider tensions within creative, technical, and cross-curricular learning across the UK. Over the last decade, British D&T GCSE entries have fallen by 68%, and the number of D&T teachers has halved. The fall in D&T has destabilised the whole subject area, masking steep declines in all art and design subjects and cutting off a vital pipeline for creative and engineering talent into industry. Without decisive action from government, industry, and education, the subject risks falling into the margins of the curriculum at the very time it is most needed. All young people must be able to access a great design education if they are to develop the creative problem solving, material intelligence, and systems thinking ability they need to thrive…Design and technology (D&T) is one of the few spaces in the school curriculum where science and creativity meet, and students get to solve real-world problems in innovative ways. The UK’s design industry itself contributes £97.4bn in GVA and is growing at twice the rate of the economy as a whole - it now needs new and diverse talent to lead us forward.”

We celebrate and support the Design Council’s recommendations, along with the Campaign for the Arts, and many other initiatives fighting to ensure that creative education is properly valued and accessible to all. MDXPD will continue to do what it can, connecting with schools, teachers and students to create innovative vertically integrated educational experiences and developing practice-based research that support those experiences.

Have a look through this year’s magazine to see the brilliant work that Product Design and Engineering students, graduates, staff and collaborative partners produce, and the real-world impacts that work can have in our features and reflections.

Good luck to our fantastic graduates for the future!

We hope you enjoy the magazine and best wishes to all readers.