Location: MOP2, Aula Design
moderated byProf. Prof. h.c. Dirk Gebhardt (Dekan)
Prof.in Nora Fuchs and Prof. Jens Müller report about their research semester and exiting current projects!
I. Nora Fuchs: Tipping point, or “I understand, but there are strict laws.”
In 2024, Nora Fuchs spent three months as an artist in residence in Iceland for her artistic research project on tipping points. She investigated and analyzed different processes and how they can be transformed into visualizations and thus made perceptible. Artistic research is an open-ended working method. The experiment does not have a predefined goal. The starting point is the search for an ideal landscape. The approach to exploring the materiality of the natural space is to observe and capture processes of change through light, clouds, and weather phenomena.
Nora Fuchs is a visual artist living in Dortmund and Berlin. She works with space, installation, sound, and video art. She has taught at the Design Department of the Dortmund University of Applied Sciences and Arts since 2003 as a professor of plastic design and applied form design. She is a member of GKG.eV., a university-based network for artistic teaching. Since 1999, she has been active as a curator, board member, and participating artist in the “Kunstverein Alte Schule Baruth.”
In 2019, she won the “Leere Sockel” competition of the Berlin Senate District Treptow Köpenick with her work “Schwimmtieralarm,” which was displayed in the city for six months as a participatory project. More about her work at: www.norafuchs.de
II. Jens Müller: Visual identities in Japan and Germany
At first glance, Japan and Germany seem to have little in common - whether you look at writing systems, geography, or food culture. After 1945, however, both countries underwent a very similar development history in certain areas of the economy and society. Communication design as a direct and indirect mirror of these developments is therefore a particularly interesting field of study. From the 1950s onwards, there was an intensive exchange between the two design scenes, which was reflected in publications, exhibitions, and conferences, but also in the communication of design. Several influential designers from both countries referred to the other country in their work.
The first part of the research project sought to identify connections in the exchange between the Japanese and West German design scenes. A landmark event in design history was the World Design Conference, which took place in Tokyo in May 1960 and provided a forum for intensive exchange between designers from both countries. In the years that followed, groundbreaking visual identities emerged in both Japan and Germany, including the visual identities of the 1964 Tokyo and 1972 Munich Olympic Games. As a significant development in the design profession, the design of individual communication media was expanded to include a serial-conceptual dimension. The second part of the research deals with the development history of pictograms, which remain a central element of visual identity to this day. An examination of historical and current Japanese word and figurative trademarks clearly illustrates the similarities and differences.
Jens Müller, born in 1982, studied communication design in Düsseldorf. Subsequently he opened his own design studio and worked for clients from culture and business. For Deutsche Post, he has realized over a dozen special stamps since 2007, which have been printed in editions of millions. Since 2019, he has been running the design studio vista in Düsseldorf together with Katharina Sussek and Andreas Magino (see https://studiovista.de/studio). In addition to his work as a designer, he researches the history of international graphic design and is the author of highly regarded reference books, including bestsellers such as Logo Modernism and The History of Graphic Design. In the past years, he compiled research projects about the visual history of corporations like Lufthansa, Puma, ZDF, or Deutsche Bahn. Since 2021, Jens Müller has held the professorship for Corporate Design at the Design Department of the Dortmund University of Applied Sciences and Arts.
