Prof. Axel Thallemer

Professor Axel Thallemer was born in 1959 in Munich. He studied philosophy at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University, and obtained a "Diplom-Ingenieur in Interior Architecture with civil engineering" from the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich. He has undertaken professorships at Munich and Hamburg, and from 2004 on, has been Dean and Chair of Industrial Design at Linz, Austria, repositioning design under the brand scionic®. Thallemer has been a visiting professor to date at 16 universities in the US and Asia. Since 2014, Thallemer has been the Deputy Head of Research at the National University of Singapore’s School of Design and Environment’s Division of Industrial Design. His first appointment was in a brand identity agency at Hamburg. He then worked for five years as a design engineer in the styling studio at the Research and Development Center of Porsche AG, Stuttgart. In 1994 he founded and became the Head of Festo Corporate Design. Since 2004, Axel has been self-employed under the motto “Innovation input by team Airena®!” yielding 35 patents currently. His designs are included in the permanent collections of ten museums around the world. Since 2002, he is a Life Fellow of The Royal Society of Arts, London. He has written so far 7 books on design, both contributing to about a few tens and being cited in hundreds refereed publications.