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 received a DAAD postgraduate scholarship in business, public relations, and psychology at NYSID, New York. 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®. Axel has been a visiting professor to date at 16 universities in the US and Asia, among them the University of Houston (USA), the Academy of Fine Arts and Design, Guangzhou and Tsinghua University, Beijing (China), and Shih-Chien University, Taipei (Taiwan) and Nanyang Technological University (Singapore) and Musashino Art University - Science of Design, Tokyo (Japan). Since 2014, Axel has been the Deputy Head of Research at the National University of Singapore’s School of Design and Environment’s Division of Industrial Design.
Axel’s 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. There, he initiated the introduction of the Computer Aided Styling process. In 1994 he founded and became the Head of Festo Corporate Design – a company geared towards long-lasting capital goods and components of industrial automation. After Sony in 2000, he was awarded “design team of the year 2001”, handing that trophy over to Apple in 2002. Since 2004, Axel has been self-employed under the motto “Innovation input by team Airena®!” yielding 35 patents currently.
Axel has participated in numerous group exhibitions at MoMA, Museum of Modern Art, and Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, New York City, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and his designs are included in the permanent collections of ten museums around the world. He has won national and international awards and prizes. Since 2002 FRSA, he is now a Life Fellow of The Royal Society of Arts, London, which was founded in 1754. Axel, iIDSA, received also an Innovation Award from the German Printing Industry in 2009 (first prize in the books category) and received an Excellence Award at the 15th International Bicycle Design Competition, Taipei Cycle 2011, just to name a couple. He has written so far 7 books on design, both contributing to about a few tens and being cited in hundreds refereed publications. Axel is also a member of a project group formulating action recommendation “Additive Manufacturing” for German Industry on behalf of acatech – German National Academy of Science and Engineering, National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, Union of the German Academies of Sciences and Humanities.
