Academic Studies

Art & Design Science

Education and practical training in Design should offer the opportunity for a free choice of design-related experiences and thus a chance to deal with wide-ranging, visionary tasks. To learn judgment, the ability to discriminate, contextual knowledge, critical understanding, imagination, inventiveness and creative competence is a goal of Design Science.

The scholarly context of the training in Design offers a foundation in considerations of design history and design theory, without which the professional field of the designer could not be effectively established.

The following areas of scholarship are integrated into the Art and Design Sciences:

Design history

Representation and development of visual communication, product design and the industrial aesthetic from its beginnings to the present. Integration of drafting and design into the complex network of historical and design connections between designers, design artefacts and design schools, both historical and international.

Art science

To better understand and locate aesthetic phenomena of the (media)world, an engagement with current artistic production and approaches to its reception is indispensable.

Design - Analysis and theory

Analysis and criticism of selected design products and processes, with a consideration of the historical and social context. Analysis and review of central formal und representational elements of new media phenomena.

 

Language/Text

Introduction to the fundamentals and application of verbal communication, conveying figures of speech and text types for various communications processes from science, technology and journalism.

Aesthetics

The history of aesthetics and aesthetic theories as an area of philosophy is an important foundation for assessing design processes today.

Design science

The design sciences allow students to perceive the designed world in a reflexive way. This is made possible by conveying the history of design and engaging with current design. The important connections of decisions in Design with major cultural, political and sociological developments and themes will be clarified.

Observation and interpretation of everyday aesthetic phenomena is practised continually in the course activities. The history of technology in its complex interweaving with Industrial Design, Communication Design, art and other expressions of aesthetic dimensions is also part of design science.

Last but not least, students learn the basic concepts of aesthetics and learn how to apply them to current problems and carry them over into practical design.

Rhetoric and Reflexion

“... but that’s not how I meant it...” Again and again we encounter situations where we want to explain or amend our intentions. Rhetorical skills make the argumentation, (self)presentation and understanding of statements easier. As part of applied linguistics, differences and agreements between verbal and written expression are investigated and rhetorical stylistic devices are introduced. Theory is also put into action, however, as the focus is on applied presentation technology with the practice of writing, speaking and presenting. Thus “the art of speaking” is tried out and mastered.

Art history

For design knowledge, it is fruitful to understand individual works of art and major art work complexes within their historical (political/sociological) design-related and typological contexts. To reflect on the concept of art, to know about its development in the modern period, to recognise its differentiation and its extensive dissolution in the past few decades will also clarify design-related decisions in design or architecture. Art-historical tools – such as stylistic analysis, semiotics or hermeneutics – greatly enrich understanding of the description and interpretation of design as of other things. Through critical discussions of philosophical and artistic aspects of art and its genres, these aspects are clarified again and again.

Communication Sciences/Media

Images and language are constant, consensus-building, communicative, ephemeral, innovative, striking and much more. Communication and Media Science engages with the diversity of requirements and phenomena. The newest approaches to and develo0pments in exemplary objects and questions are elaborated. Images and uses of images, language and uses of language are described in all relevant areas and aspects and illustrated by means of suitable basic principles. The content for this examination includes not only images from art but also technical, scholarly and advertising images and the modalities of their communication.

Prof. Dr. Cordula Meier

Art and Design science

_Head of the Institute for Art and Design Science | Chairwoman of the Doctoral Committee of Faculty 4 | Decentral Equal Opportunity Officer Fac. 4

Email

+49 (0) 201_183-3303

Email

+49 (0) 201_183-3301