Research Project

The Visibility of the Ulm School of Design: From Ulm to Montréal

Matters of design are about central issues of society – that is the research project’s basic assumption. Therefore, Design is understood as an inverse technique instead of only defining it as formgiving practice: it tells us something about ‘us’ as acting subjects. In recent years, humanities and social sciences significantly increased their work on these relations. The so-called ulm model can be seen as forerunner of these thoughts, having been developed at the former Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm (HfG), i.e. the Ulm School of Design.

The school’s self-conception is asking a wide range of questions about strategies and functions of designing. This is documented in four exhibitions between 1955 and 1967. They attracted regional, national, and international attention, including a presention on the world fair in Montréal. The HfG-Archive preserves this uncharted material consisting of affiliated documents but also the original exhibition-panels from 1958. Finally, the objective of the project is to gain insights about the history of design and its mediation in post-war modernism by winnowing, documenting, and analyzing this abundant material.
The mutual proposal was filed by the HfG-Archiv Ulm, the Hochschule Pforzheim, School of Design and the Folkwang University of the Arts, Essen. Being one out of nine, the venture is funded by the VolkswagenStiftung initiative „Forschung in Museen“. The project was directed by Prof. Dr. Thomas Hensel (Pforzheim), Prof. Dr. Steffen Siegel (Essen) and Dr. Martin Mäntele (Ulm).

The results of the project were two dissertations, the exhibition HfG Ulm: Exhibition Feaver and a project website.

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