Institutional Disorientations (Guest Lecture: Isabella Brandalise)

On 17 November 2025, Isabella Brandalise (Monash University Melbourne / RMIT) will give a guest lecture at HfG Offenbach entitled “Institutional Disorientations.” Her talk will examine contemporary perspectives on institutions and their shifting frameworks.

In her practice-based inquiry, Isabella Brandalise explores disorientation as a method for reimagining institutional life within public and academic contexts. Through patainstitutioning she examines how design can both sustain and unsettle organizational norms. By mapping institutional micro-landscapes into a spiral topography, patainstitutioning emerges as a practice of designing for disorientation: using design acts to reconfigure entrenched infrastructures and to approach institutions as contingent, non-definitive fields of action.

Brandalise is a Research Fellow at WonderLab, at Monash University in Australia. Her design practice and research combine creative inquiry and design for the public realm. She holds a PhD in Design at RMIT University, a MFA in Transdisciplinary Design at Parsons School of Design and a MA in Visual Arts at the University of Brasília.

The lecture is part of the seminar ‘Effizienz der Ineffizienz’ (Efficiency of the Inefficient) (Prof. Dr Tom Bieling).