*QS Stars World University Rankings 2023
**Guardian University Guide 2025
***Research Excellence Framework 2021
****The Times and Sunday Times Good University Guide 2025
Designers work to enhance and enrich a wide variety of projects, enhancing the appeal and function of objects, processes and systems. Release your inner creative and help businesses engage their users with the University of Sunderland’s 100% online MDes Design.
This course is studied by students in the UK and from around the world, and the design issues it tackles are similarly global in nature. It is designed to challenge your thinking, so you can critically evaluate a wide range of information and ideas to use as a basis for your own approaches, methods and design thinking.
Through a dynamic curriculum that blends theoretical frameworks, historical contexts, practical exercises, and case studies, you will develop the skills and acumen needed creatively tackle design challenges. You will also expand your design abilities across a wide range of materials, software, techniques and processes, learning how to choose the best media and approach for each design job.
Finally, you will be encouraged to think about your career path throughout, and demonstrate the skills learned in a portfolio of creative work designed to help you secure your ideal job.
This course is purposefully built to help busy working professionals gain the skills and capabilities needed to develop as designers, with fully online teaching and no need to attend campus.
It offers the flexibility of asynchronous learning on a wide range of digital devices so you can study as you’re able – anywhere and anytime – around important life commitments including work, family and friends.
You can study full-time to fast-track your career progress or take the time you need around your day to day activities with a part-time learning path.
You can also get your studies started within weeks, even if outside the traditional academic year, with six start dates per year.
This course aims to develop skilled ethical designers with an understanding of how design can positively impact society and the world. You will gain a systematic understanding of design knowledge and critical awareness of current challenges and new insights at the forefront of contemporary design practice.
As a graduate, you will know how to position and promote your own work, using your knowledge of the creative industries to understand how the sector is evolving and confidently recognising possible career paths and potential demand for your creative projects.
We’ve been educating students internationally for more than 40 years and have a global reach that extends across campus locations in Hong Kong, Sunderland and London, as well as partnerships in the Caribbean, Greece, Kenya, Malaysia, Lanka, Oman, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Tashkent and Vietnam. This diversity ensures our students benefit from collaborating and learning through the lens of a variety of perspectives, while building broad professional networks.
Our international community makes up a high percentage of our overall student cohort and we have distance learning students across the globe. We’re also a leader in UK widening participation and have been awarded 7th in the UK for social inclusion (The Times and Sunday Times Good University Guide 2024).
Our expertise, our cutting-edge technology and our vast experience delivering excellent online learning experiences to global students is key to what sets the University of Sunderland and our online MDes Design apart.
If you are based in the UK, you may be eligible for a government-backed postgraduate loan to cover the full costs of the course.
In addition, if you have successfully completed an undergraduate degree at the University of Sunderland, you are eligible for a 10% tuition fees reduction on our postgraduate programmes.
You pay tuition fees for each module taken, either module-by-module or in full at the start of your course.
If you pay module-by-module, you will pay in instalments of £565.
Gain a critical understanding and experiment with a range of ideation techniques and approaches to developing creative ideas. Finetune your understanding with input from top professionals and understand how to honestly rate an idea. Learn to build a hook to captivate your audience, whether through storytelling and narrative, surprise and novelty, authenticity and passion or clever copywriting.
Effectively present and communicate your ideas. Select and apply your ideation techniques to produce imaginative concepts for a live or envisaged project.
Develop a critical understanding human activity’s impact on this planet, and the intentions of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). Learn how to be more sustainable in your own design practice, and how to use the power of design to influence other people to live more sustainably. Explore sustainability through a variety of lenses such as climate action, reversing poverty, good health and wellbeing for all, gender equality, affordable and clean energy, sustainable cities and communities, life below water and more.
Apply your design skills to address one of the many important global challenges in SDG. Aim to win a University Sustainable Futures Prize through your work in trying to make the world fit for future generations.
Develop a comprehensive understanding of approaches to design research, techniques and methodologies that can be applied to your own work, or advanced scholarship. Learn the importance of self-directed continuing professional development, as a normal means for creatives to innovate and push their boundaries and to stay at the forefront of a fast-changing creative world.
Learn how to make a brand stand out in an increasingly a micro-attentive world. Capture attention across different media and platforms including social media. Understand and experiment with key design approaches such as micro-content and snackable design, interactive and immersive experiences, multi-sensory branding, brand storytelling and associations and more. Develop a deeper understanding of brand personality, tone of voice and maintaining authenticity.
Apply your design knowledge and skills to an exciting branding project and document your creative journey through a module journal/design diary.
Gain the critical knowledge, skills, and tools necessary to lead and manage design-driven initiatives in various industries, fostering innovation, and driving business success through design. Gain insights into strategic design thinking and the leadership and management of design.
Develop an understanding of practical applications by learning from real-world examples of successful and unsuccessful design management practices. Understand some of the key considerations and issues around intellectual property and copyright.
Recognise some of the issues around managing teams and external partners, and better understand the role of a designer in the bigger picture of the design process. Use your creative design skills to explain or illuminate important aspects of design management to a non-specialist audience.
Gain the critical knowledge, skills, and tools necessary to lead and manage design-driven initiatives in various industries, fostering innovation, and driving business success through design. Gain insights into strategic design thinking and the leadership and management of design.
Develop an understanding of practical applications by learning from real-world examples of successful and unsuccessful design management practices. Understand some of the key considerations and issues around intellectual property and copyright.
Recognise some of the issues around managing teams and external partners, and better understand the role of a designer in the bigger picture of the design process. Use your creative design skills to explain or illuminate important aspects of design management to a non-specialist audience.
Gain the critical knowledge, skills, and tools necessary to lead and manage design-driven initiatives in various industries, fostering innovation, and driving business success through design. Gain insights into strategic design thinking and the leadership and management of design.
Develop an understanding of practical applications by learning from real-world examples of successful and unsuccessful design management practices. Understand some of the key considerations and issues around intellectual property and copyright.
Recognise some of the issues around managing teams and external partners, and better understand the role of a designer in the bigger picture of the design process. Use your creative design skills to explain or illuminate important aspects of design management to a non-specialist audience.
Develop a critical understanding of the role and power of design to change hearts and minds, perceptions and behaviours, and create real impact on society. Develop your study skills and research methodology. Investigate and critically evaluate how key approaches to design for social change have succeeded or failed in your own specialism, in past and contemporary work.
Identify important societal or global issues that you are passionate about, and apply what you’ve learned to develop your own ideas, concepts and creative designs for a project that will help make the world a better place.
Gain a critical understanding of strategies to maximise the chances of interview and employment including common shortlisting processes, and key interview questions and responses. Critically evaluate approaches to self-employment and the pros and cons of different types of structure. Understand some of the key profit/loss, tax implications and impacts on lifestyle, of being employed or self-employed.
Develop strategies for identifying employers or clients that would value your style of work and those you would like to work with. Fine-tune how you describe your skills and knowledge and align it to your ideal career path.
Gain a critical understanding of what constitutes good self-promotional materials in differing contexts, such as showreel, portfolio and online profile. Understand the power of interaction with your audience and plan to harness unpaid promotion and advertising. Learn the language of self-description, that allows the highlighting of strengths while avoiding appearance of arrogance.
Apply your advanced skills to design self-promotional materials that will give you the best chance of gaining the kind of work that you aspire to do as a career.
Research and critically analyse key design practitioners, design movements, styles, theories or design history in their contexts. Gain an awareness of some of the principles of the decolonisation of design. Evaluate areas of design theory or history that are particularly relevant to your current design practice.
Produce artefacts (posters, motion design or whatever best suits the message) which illustrate the principles of that history/theory and thoughtfully critique the work or communicate how that work is relevant to your current or emerging practice.
Gain a critical understanding of what a ‘design manifesto’ is, and how these have been used, or have been influential through history. Reflect on your own ethos or philosophy about the role and practice of design in the world. Reflect on your own values, beliefs and motivations as a designer. Create your own new design manifesto. Discuss ways of promoting your manifesto to diverse audiences and the intended impact that you would like to see from its dissemination.
Critically understand how implementing the practices from your own personal philosophy of design, could be a roadmap to becoming who you want to be as a designer, and making the kind of positive impact on the world that you aspire to.
QTop 40 university (Guardian University Guide 2025)
Best in North East (The Times Good University Guide 2024)
More than 70% of Nursing research rated ‘world leading’ or of 'international importance'***
University of the Year for Social Inclusion (The Times and Sunday Times Good University Guide, 2024)