Tobia Repossi runs the first year of the Industrial Design course at Arucad Arkin University of Creative Arts and Design in Cyprus.
The course provides the student with a comprehensive view of the product development process, including basic skills in sketch techniques and an understanding of the importance of design as well as more profound skills in working with computer-aided design.
Designing a consumer product (or a tool, a car, a piece of furniture) does not mean just “inventing” something, but also knowing how to describe its characteristics in functional, physical, technical, aesthetic-formal and image terms so that its use can be understood and its possible realisation and production can be described. Therefore, product design implies a great variety of complementary skills, all equally functional to the development of objects designed for the needs of those who will have to use them, and before, realise them.
The product designer’s project development is the creative ideation or redefinition of everyday artefacts and everything that people choose, buy, use, and consume; his/her proposal is an innovative solution, adjusted to the individual and collective needs, understandable in use, respectful of regulatory requirements, consistent with the opportunities and the environmental, technological and productive restrictions. The designer knows how to understand and provide answers to the user’s expectations, by connecting them with those of the economic and production system and has the necessary skills to create something that can be realized according to the industrial reproducibility rules, in full agreement with his/her socio-economic context, social conventions, traditional and innovative technologies, business techniques, market rules, distribution and communication. His/her intellectual role is to promptly understand the design question and provide an improvement from a cultural, social and technical point of view.
This BA programme in Industrial Product Design is thought for the broadest framework of the wide world of artefacts, including long-lasting consumer goods interpreting product design both literally and in its broader meaning from furniture design and in the many manufacturing and industrial goods sectors.
The study programme in Industrial Product Design provides a strong basic education, at the theoretical and operational level, in the field of the project disciplines, and it is designed in order to include, around its main methodological core, all the appropriate disciplines. Historical-critical information related to the culture of the project and to the artefact development are provided, humanistic disciplines that understand social and cultural contexts, scientific and technological courses related to materials and technologies of transformation, processing and production, and lectures on economic culture in order to be able to better understand business contexts and markets. At the same time the programme wants to develop representation technique skills (from drawing by hand to technical drawing, from photography to three-dimensional studio and prototype modelling), techniques for digital image production and visual language interpretation.
The study programme in Industrial Product Design trains a Project Technician profile able to support all activities from the creation phase to production and distribution on the market. The graduating student has a wide range of employment opportunities, in all activities related to the field of product design, both as professionals that in company, as well as in all design fields in the widest sense.
