Department of Product Design
The Estonian Academy of Arts Department of Product Design is engaged with human-centred design. We have been training professional designers here for more than 50 years. Historically, product design study has focused on industrial design. The rapid development in the ICT sector has now broadened the term product design, and a new field – digital product design – now complements the previous field of industrial design (furniture, electronics etc.).
Our department allows study on the basis of two curricula:
- the bachelor’s degree curriculum in Industrial and Digital Product Design,
- master’s degree curriculum in Product Design.
Theupdated bachelor’s degree programme has two areas of specialization: industrial design (previously called product design) and digital product design. During the first semester, our students study together; then they can choose one area of specialization.
Due to labour market demand for digital product designers, in autumn 2018 we opened our digital product design area of specialization. This gave designers interested in the IT field the technical knowledge and digital design skills they needed.
In the Product Design master’s degree programme, we focus on design of objects. (Creation of digital solutions can be studied on the basis of the Academy of Arts Interaction Design curriculum).
Both bachelor’s and master’s programmes are practical in their nature: we solve real-life product development challenges in cooperation with businesses. In the 2017/2018 academic year, we designed a package drone for Cleveron, helped Europe’s best student company Festera with product development and created a vision of an e-donor environment for the North Estonia Medical Centre donor centre.
“Design is a practical, interdisciplinary, human-centred, creative process that seeks for the best solutions for existing problems.” Martin Pärn, industrial designer, partner with the Iseasi design bureau.
