Bachelor of Design (Honours)

The Bachelor of Design (Honours) is an advanced one-year design degree offered to students wishing to deepen and extend their knowledge from their undergraduate design studies. Students graduate with skills and expertise that are in demand from industry, the business sector and society. These include strong disciplinary abilities in their field that prepares graduates for high levels of creative and critical practice in industry as well as qualifying for scholarships and awards. Graduates are also sought-after for their capabilities in design research, design strategy, project management, communication and design advocacy.

Students choose a pathway where they develop and lead a major project throughout the year. These research driven, industry informed and socially responsive pathways are:

• The Independent Practice Project which allows students to extend and hone their disciplinary expertise through the conceptualisation, research and development of a major work. Disciplinary areas are:
  • Fashion and Textiles
  • Product Design, and
  • Visual Communication (including Photography)

• The Social Innovation Project which enables students to build their expertise in the emerging areas of social and service design by situating their major project in response to a given complex problem and collaborating with industry, community and research partners.

All students are guided to develop advanced theoretical knowledge of their design area and document their process and findings in an academic research paper or dissertation. This qualifies graduates to enter into further PhD and postgraduate training, while also establishing critical reflection and writing skills that are highly valued by industry.

Students are mentored in their development of methods and material experimentations by experts relevant to their design domain. These domains include fashion and textile design, product design, visual communication, photography, motion graphics, AI and AR, social design, service design, strategic design and more. Students also learn to advocate for the role of design in the world, generating professional bios and project explainers to amplify the impact of their work.

The Bachelor of Design (Honours) is situated in state-of-the-art facilities, with specially designed seminars, masterclasses, workshops and industry events.

You can see showcases of the excellent work from past Honours students here:

• Fashion and Textiles
• Visual Communication and Photography
• Product Design
• Social Innovation Project

Global career opportunities for Honours graduates in product design, fashion & textile design, visual communication, creative industries and social, service and strategic design are expanding. Professional designers are now employed well beyond the creative industries, for example to bring design thinking to business and community sectors and to lead design projects. UTS Design Honours graduates are highly sought after in existing and emergent fields. Honours graduates develop disciplinary expertise while also possessing skills to practice beyond their specific discipline and contribute to broader outcomes. Honours graduates know how to work independently and thrive in teams and are equipped with the high-level communication and advocacy skills to become writers, researchers, editors, and critics.

In fashion & textile design, global career opportunities for Honours graduates include fashion designer, textile designer, pattern cutter, art/creative director, print designer and work in fashion production and fashion forecasting. Some graduates start their own fashion design business, while others work within an established company locally or with international brands.

Graduates specialising in product design enjoy careers as in-house product designers in a manufacturing company or working as a design consultant. Graduates work in emerging fields such as service and strategic design or digital interaction design, adapting advanced technologies for new experiences and networked environments. Integrated education also allows graduates to move beyond design to managing production, distribution and the marketing of new products. Honours also prepares graduates for further study in specialised fields such as transport design or associated professional disciplines.

As a critical discipline in today's complex information rich world, graduates specialising in visual communication and photography experiment with emerging and traditional technologies to expand how text and image (whether data-driven, generative, moving or still) can provide new frameworks for social and cultural change. Incorporating a wide range of practices, graduates work in information visualisation, interaction design, motion design, photographic practice and photographic studios, publishing, web media, wayfinding, creative code, machine learning, 3D technologies such as augmented reality and virtual reality, as well as service and strategy design.

Honours graduates also continue to study at the postgraduate level in both coursework or research degrees, as well as qualify for prestigious postgraduate scholarships.