For today’s episode, we welcome the leaders behind the Office for Product Design. Nicol Boyd began his training in design at the Glasgow School of Art. After completing his undergraduate degree in 1999 he moved to Italy to work for Alessi, where he developed products for among others Achille Castiglioni, Alessandro Mendini, Alberto Meda and Michael Graves. He returned to the UK to continue his design studies at the Royal College of Art, graduating in 2004. The following years saw him working at IDEO, first as a resident in their San Francisco and Palo Alto offices, and later with the Munich and London offices. He also spent a year at Nokia’s design department in London, before establishing himself as a freelance designer. This period saw a renewed collaboration with Tomas Rosén and ultimately led to the formation of the Office for Product Design in Hong Kong in 2007.
Tomas Rosén originally studied philosophy at Stockholm University before completing a master’s degree in mechanical engineering at Linköping University. Scholarships from the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences and the Marcus Wallenberg Foundation led him to pursue additional postgraduate design studies at the Royal College of Art in London, where he graduated in 2004. Having previously worked on design projects for Volvo and Scania in Sweden, he joined Nokia’s design department in London in 2005 and subsequently went on to co-found the Office for Product Design in Hong Kong with Nicol Boyd in 2007.
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