Long Live the Late Bloomers: Current State of the Design PhD in Germany

Katharina Bredies studied integrated design at the University of Arts Bremen and graduated in 2006 with a diploma thesis about the use of cybernetic systems analysis in design. She finished her PhD at Braunschweig University of Art on the topic of irritation in design in 2014. Katharina is a postdoctoral researcher at Design Research Lab Berlin, where she also conducted her doctoral research, and at the School of Textiles in Borås, Sweden. She is the co-founder of Design Promoviert—a grass-roots student-organized doctoral colloquium—and the manager of the Design Research Network—an online discussion forum for young design researchers.

Christian Wölfel studied industrial design at the Technische Universität Dresden, Germany and was a visiting student at the Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design. Since 2005, he has been a research associate and lecturer at the Technische Universität Dresden, where his focus has been on knowledge acquisition through reflective and narrative methods in the fuzzy front-end of design processes and where he recently completed his PhD.