Plural Pathways to Understanding

On October 31, 2025, the Doctoral Program of the HfG Offenbach University of Art and Design hosted its annual Doctoral Colloquium in the university’s Aula. From morning until late afternoon, five doctoral researchers presented their ongoing work at the intersection of design, art, and theory, offering rich insight into the transdisciplinary research culture that defines HfG Offenbach. The event, moderated by Tom Bieling, exemplified the university’s unique approach to doctoral studies, where artistic practice and theoretical reflection are deeply intertwined. Doctoral research at HfG typically combines two-thirds written academic work with one-third artistic or design-based practice, conceived not as separate parts but as complementary modes of inquiry. Each doctoral candidate is supervised by professors from both theoretical and artistic disciplines, underscoring the institution’s commitment to fostering a research environment that unites reflection, experimentation, and social engagement.

In her presentation, Emma Sicher explored how biodiverse SCOBY materials – symbiotic cultures of bacteria and yeast — can be cultivated and shaped through collaboration with plants. Her research does not seek to produce new materials in an industrial sense, but to understand the relationships between microbes, plants, humans, and their environments. Combining laboratory experimentation, fieldwork, and pedagogical practice, Sicher studies how plant-based infusions influence the growth and properties of bacterial cellulose. Field research in Thailand investigates traditional fermentation practices and the ecological and spiritual knowledge of local communities, while work in Berlin focuses on regional plants and microorganisms to strengthen local ecological connections. By translating her insights into workshops and educational formats, she invites students and citizens alike to experiment with living materials. Her project redefines Biodesign as a regenerative material culture — an approach to design that works with, rather than upon, biological processes, opening new perspectives on sustainability, materiality, and cooperation between human and nonhuman agents. The following discussion also addressed the question of how to define the boundary fields of design research PhDs that operate in the in-between zones of design, biology, and science.

Magdalene Hengst devoted her talk to the phenomenological significance of experience, embodiment, and vulnerability in the writings of Jean Améry. Her project reads Améry’s reflections—shaped by his experiences as a resistance fighter, Jewish intellectual, and Auschwitz survivor — as a form of political epistemology. While classical phenomenology, from Merleau-Ponty onward, often celebrates the body as a source of possibility and agency (“I can”), Améry reverses this paradigm: his reflections on torture, aging, and suicide show that knowledge can also arise from failure, injury, and the inability to act (“I cannot”). Hengst interprets this as a negative epistemology, one in which suffering becomes a form of insight and the body’s limits become the limits of understanding. By connecting Améry’s thinking to feminist standpoint theories such as those of bell hooks and Donna Haraway, she argues that his work offers an embodied extension of situated knowledge—foregrounding the physical and affective dimensions often overlooked in epistemological discourse. In doing so, her research contributes to a re-politicization of knowledge, grounded in vulnerability and lived experience.

Carina Moser‘s project examined the ethical responsibilities of designers in the field of User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI) design in the context of global crises. Starting from the observation that digital interfaces frequently influence or manipulate user behavior through so-called Dark Patterns, Nudging, or Captology (computers as persuasive technologies), Moser’s work aims to both historicize and critically re-evaluate these design practices. Her goal is to develop an alternative model of ethical design — the concept of “Bright Patterns,” which emphasizes transparency, empowerment, and user trust. One chapter, titled “Assumptions by Preference: Between Design Bias and Psychological Triggers,” analyzes how interface elements appeal to fundamental psychological needs and how such triggers can become sites of both manipulation and responsibility. Her project ultimately rethinks the designer’s role as an ethical actor who consciously wields design’s power over perception and behavior to enable autonomy rather than constrain it. In the subsequent discussion, the question was raised as to the extent to which design research–based doctoral projects should (not) develop solutions to perceived problems, thereby running the risk of adopting an overly moralizing stance.

Turning to questions of organizational design, Brian Switzer presented his investigation into hospitals as complex systems of work and coordination. Building on management theories, he expands his approach with sociological frameworks that shed light on the temporal, social, and structural dynamics of hospital work. Drawing on Anselm Strauss’s typology of medical labor, Eviatar Zerubavel’s concept of socially constructed time, and Ross Koppel’s studies on clinical workarounds, Switzer links theory with field observations on wayfinding, signage, and staff communication. His research aims to apply these insights to the practical design of hospital environments, demonstrating how design can mediate between organizational efficiency and the lived experience of staff and patients alike. The ensuing discussion centered on the social construction of time and explored how such understandings could influence approaches to designing wayfinding in hospital environments.

The Thing, Image: Cryptomuseum.

Finally, Jonas Berger‘s presentation explored the communicative and functional logic of hiding. His dissertation examines how physical hiding-objects convey their inconspicuousness and fulfill their concealing function. The concept of “Hide-Semantics” he develops analyzes the perceptual and material conditions that make an object a successful hiding place. Berger studies techniques of perception management and expectation control, focusing on the notion of object plausibility — how an object’s material, weight, and form align with everyday expectations to remain unnoticed. He connects these insights to the language of product design, revealing how communicative features of hiding objects overlap with general design strategies that balance visibility and discretion. His project also considers the social and symbolic functions of hiding, offering a nuanced understanding of how design participates in systems of perception, secrecy, and interaction. Berger paid particular attention to The Thing, the ingenious Soviet listening device concealed within a wooden Great Seal of the United States. By examining Léon Theremin’s design (Yes, Theremin, the inventor of the instrument of the same name), Berger highlights how functional invisibility and communicative plausibility intersect — how an object can be both materially present and perceptually absent. The Thing thus serves as a paradigmatic case in his study of how concealment operates through design, perception, and meaning.

Each project approached knowledge as a situated, embodied, and ethically charged process, expanding the scope of design/art research to address biological, social, and philosophical dimensions of contemporary life – a model of inquiry where practice, theory, reflection and critique mutually inform one another. The engaged and stimulating discussion of the day was further evidenced by the fact that, subsequently, a larger group convened to continue the conversation over a meal at a nearby restaurant.