Teaching Design
After teaching at universities across Europe for more than ten years, I accepted the call to take up the Interaction and Complex Product Systems professorship at Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences in 2017.
The focus of my design lessons lies in the strategic design of integrated hardware-software-service systems. Today, designers no longer design just individual products, but rather entire ecosystems. This has become increasingly important with advancements in digitalization and the spread of artificial intelligence.
In order to create these ecosystems, business processes and structures that enable superior compelling product and customer experiences need to be taken into consideration. As such, my design topics are always accompanied by questions of design leadership or design management and the methodological integration of design.
To best describe this area of focus, I adopted the term Digital System Design in 2019.
In draft projects and seminars, I teach the basics of user experience design, information, interface and interaction design as well as workflows for the development of digital product experiences and systems.
The classification of entrepreneurial processes and developments of digital value creation scenarios are as much part of the curriculum as the experimental exploration of digital technologies and their application in human-technology interaction. I consider the close exchange with industry and business important; I cultivate these relationships through regular excursions, third-party collaborations and joint project work.
I empower aspiring designers to use innovative processes to articulate the needs of users and integrate them into economically sustainable solutions that go far beyond what is technologically feasible. Design can thus make a significant contribution to the humanization of technologies and make positive contributions to the digital transformation of products, processes and business models in the economy.