Research

In our research on design and intelligence, we ask how design – and its intellectual and material practices – can be reconceptualized and recontextualized in the digital age. Our work is situated against the backdrop of the “reconfiguration” of design positions, processes, and practices initiated by the Digital Turn in the 1990s and massively accelerated by artificial intelligence, machine learning, and networked systems. Of particular interest are the resulting transformations of authorship and autonomy, creativity and control, intuition and imagination, as well as materiality and mediality. We investigate how human and machine forms of interaction and intelligence become entangled in design, and what new forms of coexistence, creativity, and agency emerge from these topological relations. Design is understood here as a research-oriented (and cross-sectoral) practice in which technological, machine-based, and/or artificial intelligence is not simply employed and applied, but itself designed, questioned, and negotiated.

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In our research on design and materiality, we investigate how design processes can be rethought and reframed in the context of computerized materials and automated manufacturing. At the core is the seamless integration of design and fabrication, programming and production, and ultimately data and physical matter. As such, parametric design and digital fabrication are understood not as separate spheres, but as entangled systems in which form, material, and fabrication logic mutually condition and generate one another. This creates new relationships between the virtual and the physical, opening up new aesthetic and functional avenues for understanding design as a continuous process between code, material, and making. We explore these relationships, configurations, and transitions to develop new epistemologies of designing and materializing, and to reconsider design as an open, dynamic process. This research is conducted, among others, in collaboration with the Professorship of Emerging Technologies and Design.

Further information can be found here.

In our research on corporeality, we explore how design processes, bodily configurations, and material exploration are entangled and inform each other. We understand corporeality as a central dimension of design, in which experiences,  materiality, and everyday life intersect. Digital methods, tools, and techniques open up new possibilities for investigating, modelling, and articulating bodily and material processes through design. At the same time, we are interested in how digital and analogue practices intertwine and what new – designerly – forms of data and body, image and interaction, algorithm and intervention emerge from these relationships. Our focus is on the relationality of body, material, and technology, and on how design and design knowledge can be reframed through these entanglements. The research is conducted in collaboration with the Professorship of Experimental Industrial Design. 

Further information can be found here.

In our research on craft, we explore how design, material, and experimentation come together. Our work is not limited to the use of digital methods and tools, but seeks a deeper understanding of the design processes involved and of material forms of knowledge. In this sense, programming, modelling, and making are understood as craft-based cultural techniques that open up new forms of design and making, while also enabling novel – at times unconventional – entanglements of code and intuition, material and interaction, and control and process. The research is supported, among others, by the Thüringer Aufbaubank.

Further information can be found here.

In our research on design and cultural heritage, we investigate how digital and interactive technologies open up new approaches to material (and immaterial) cultural heritage and its objects, and how they transform – or mediate – their exploration, perception and interpretation. Situated at the intersection of Computational Design and the Digital Humanities, our work focuses on the development of heritage-related paradigms, processes, and practices, with particular emphasis on digitally reconstructive and digital-material approaches. Data-driven, algorithmic, and intelligent methods are systematically further developed and brought together in heritage research to enable new design, theoretical, and methodological approaches to the interdisciplinary investigation, contextualization, future mediation, and multidimensional interpretation and preservation of cultural heritage. Research on design and cultural heritage is, among other activities, linked to the International Heritage Center of Bauhaus-Universität Weimar.

Further information can be found here.

In our research on the design of interaction – and interactionality – we investigate which aesthetic positions and theoretical perspectives emerge through novel digital interaction technologies and systems, and which design processes, spaces, and interfaces can be derived from them. Situated at the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction, User Experience, and Interaction Design, our work is concerned not only with functional aspects and solutions, but with a deeper theoretical and methodological understanding of the associated design methods, material realization, and transformative modes of experience. At the core of our research are the diverse interactions between humans, technology, space, and material, as well as the question of how these shape perception, action, and experience – and how interaction itself becomes an aesthetic, social, and transformative process.

Further information can be found here.