#MDXPD Product Design 2025-26

MDXPD began as a vision for a different kind of Product Design - a programme where the focus fell on developing and nurturing new practices, on intellectual curiosity and creative courage, on critical reflection and social critique, rather than just on narrow alignment with 'industrial' employer needs. From the outset we set out to collectively develop programmes founded on reflective practice, creating flexible and bold thinkers: with a robust creative and technical foundation, able to adapt to uncertainty, to envision change and to drive it. That ambition feels more urgent now than it has ever been. As the repercussions of recent decades' socio-economic and environmental drift become ever more pointed, and as universities wrestle with their own identity - with the identity and intent of education itself - we find ourselves a microcosm for the battle for the soul of education. Who, and what, is it for? The reductive answer, driven by business models, by ‘metrics’, by hierarchies, explored and critiqued in Peter Fleming’s book ‘Dark Academia: How Universities Die’, too often holds sway. But there is always hope. The student work, the staff research and practice, and the Graduate Development Programme (see feature) gathered in these pages tell positive and diverse stories: of how to imagine and direct positive change, and how to counter the corrosive tides running through education and society. Change will continue. Change is everything, and the dialectic between opposing interpretations of future possibility is the one constant within it. We each have a collective opportunity to contribute what we can - in the most optimistic, non-exclusionary and collaborative ways we can imagine. To go on embracing uncertainty, to value diverse lived and living experience, and to build, together, the confidence and the skills to challenge the reductive 'norms' that crowd in around us. That, through design and engineering, is what we have always aimed to do. It is a conviction we share well beyond these walls. Shouting back to 2024’s magazine, the Design Council's A Blueprint for Renewal (2024) and its warning that Design and Technology is a subject in critical decline - a microcosm, in its own right, of wider tensions across creative, technical and cross-curricular learning in the UK. We stand with the Campaign for the Arts and the many initiatives fighting to ensure that creative education is properly valued and accessible to all. In a Higher Education landscape unsettled by neo-liberal ideology, demographic shift and a decade and a half of policy churn - by course closures and redundancies - MDXPD will try to keep doing what it can: connecting with schools, teachers and students, building vertically integrated educational experiences, and developing the practice-based research that sustains them. This questioning spirit runs through our longest-running thread of work. For more than a decade Ahmed Patel and I have pursued an action research voyage through this magazine, that keeps asking what higher education in design and engineering should and could be, how higher education might best prepare designers of complex systems and artefacts. What its graduate outcomes reveal, year on year, is an exciting openness: Product Design as a practice that opens doors rather than closing them. The answer to 'what is a product designer?' is not fixed, and that is precisely the point. How long, and in what way, we will continue that battle will unfold over the coming year. Turn the page for the brilliant work of our students, graduates, staff and collaborative partners, and for the real-world impact it carries. Good luck to our fantastic graduates for the future. And do check in next year, to see what actually happened. Wyn Griffiths - Senior Lecturer BA/BEng Product Design/Engineering