Thomas Degn is a practitioner of industrial design, applied design research and design teaching. Since 2008 he has had the responsibility as the Programme Director for the Masters programme of Advanced Product Design at Umeå Institute of Design (UID). He has studied at the Aarhus School of Architecture and at the Umeå Institute of Design (UID) in the northern part of Sweden, from which he holds an MA in Industrial Design. He’s originally from Jutland, Denmark.

He has been directing the research programme Safe Effective Transport in cooperation with Volvo Trucks, and also has a vast experience of cooperating with companies and experts in other areas. For many years, he participated in applied research projects in cooperation with Volvo. Degn is also a member of the steering group of Design Västerbotten, a regional project for sharing and spreading knowledge of design to companies and organisations.

As the Programme Director of The Advanced Product Design at UID he has helped establish the university as one of the top design schools in the world. The students from the programme have between 2009-2013 won 16 awards in the American design competition International Design Excellence Awards (IDEA), which in 2013 made the Umeå Institute of Design the most winning school and solidified the institute’s 3rd place on IDEA’s ranking of the most winning school over the past five years. Both in 2012 and 2013 UID was ranked 1st on Red Dot’s rankling list of schools in Americas and Europe and UID was in 2013 year ranked 3rd by iF in Germany on their list of schools worldwide as the highest ranked non-Asian school.

Shown here are examples of recent student work.