MFA in Advanced Product Design

Umeå Institute of Design is, by most rankings and by the consensus of the profession, one of the two or three best industrial design schools in the world. It sits inside Umeå University in northern Sweden, five hundred kilometres above Stockholm, and the MFA in Advanced Product Design is its flagship two-year, 120-ECTS programme, taught entirely in English. More than eighty per cent of the students come from outside Sweden, which makes the studio a genuinely international environment rather than a Swedish one with visitors.

The programme trains industrial design consultants — people who can design products and technical solutions for industry, institutions and public authorities. The method is project-based to an unusual degree: applied design projects form the backbone of the two years, each combining lectures, field trips, user studies, workshops and long stretches of studio and workshop work, and the majority are run with external partners, which over the last decades have included the major European automotive, appliance, medical-device and consumer-electronics companies. Students work through user studies, problem identification and analysis, and new technologies and materials, increasingly framed around environmental and societal challenges rather than styling exercises. The school's model shops, prototyping workshops and digital fabrication facilities are the reason the work looks the way it does.

For Sri Lankan applicants this is a portfolio school first and a university second — admission turns on the work you show, not on your grades. That is worth understanding clearly, because it means a strong designer from a Sri Lankan background can compete against applicants from far more expensive design educations. Sri Lanka has a real and growing design capability: the Department of Integrated Design at Moratuwa, the innovation and product-development functions at MAS Holdings and Brandix, the ceramics and homeware manufacturers, the furniture and consumer-products sector, and a UX and product design community around the technology firms. What almost nobody in that ecosystem has is a UID degree — and in the international design industry it opens doors that little else does.