Kunsthochschule Kassel
kunsthochschulekassel.de
kunsthochschulekassel.de/studium/produktdesign
Prof. Ayzit Bostan
Professorship for Design of Textile Products
Prof. Dr. Susanne Ritzmann
Professorship for Sustainable Product Design and Development
Prof. Oliver Vogt
Professorship for Industrial Design
Prof. Jakob Gebert
Professorship for Furniture Design and Exhibition Architecture
Prof. Lutz Pankow
Professorship for Product Design Foundation Class
Prof. Daniel Hornuff
Professorship for Theory and Practice of Design
Prof. Annette Bertsch
Adjunct Professor | Design Management
Professor Martin Schmitz
Lucius & Annemarie Burckhardt Professorship
The Kunsthochschule Kassel, with its degree programs in Visual Arts, Visual Communication (both with artistic final examinations, equal to MFA), Product Design (diploma), Art Education (teaching degree), and Art History and Theory, is a partially autonomous department of the University of Kassel. It offers an integrated combination of scholarly, artistic, and art educations programs. This interdisciplinary approach at the Kunsthochschule has been pursued and constantly refined for over 30 years.
The Kunsthochschule maintains 13 cross-disciplinary workshops, for instance in the areas of ceramics, plastic, wood, textiles, or photography, continuing traditions such as that of the Bauhaus, namely of constructively combining technical and artistic skills.
Degree Program in Product Design
Design pervades our everyday lives. Whatever we do, there are always products there with us. Whether as technological devices, as industrial products, in the form of furniture, clothing, accessories and continuing on to analogue and digital spaces as well as entire systems–design is ubiquitous and often responsible for how people structure their daily lives, how they cultivate their social relationships, and how they assign value to their experiences.
Against this backdrop, the job profile of designers has become professionalized into a complex field. If in former times the designing of ordinary things was mostly a matter of tradition, today it is considered a cultural technology, demanding a wide variety of skills. Inventiveness and craftsmanship combine with broad knowledge about materials, technologies, manufacturing processes, and aesthetic developments–and not least requiring critical awareness of social and political conditions!
The study program in product design at the Kunsthochschule Kassel integrates all these areas. In projects and seminars students learn how things are creatively drafted, tested in prototypes, and finally brought to full implementation. They work in close association with the professors in the program, with access to a variety of workshops and digital tools at the Kunsthochschule, thus getting the opportunity to develop their own concepts step by step. An endowed professorship on the work of Lucius Burckhardt as well as a project professorship awarded each year to an internationally outstanding design figure complete the course offerings.
