Coburg University of Applied Sciences and Arts

The study module is devoted to the subject of Otl Aicher, one of the most for­ma­tive German de­sign­ers of the 20th century. He set up the Ulm Design College in 1953 to­gether with his wife Inge Aicher-Scholl and the ar­chi­tect and artist Max Bill. He would have turned 100 last year. The Coburg Uni­ver­sity of Applied Sci­ences and Arts has joined forces with diverse ar­chi­tects, in­te­rior de­sign­ers and hard­ware de­sign­ers from FSB to grapple with Aicher’s vast oeuvre in depth. They have been dis­cov­er­ing and analysing his in­ter­dis­ci­pli­nary out­pour­ings, his texts, ideas and the­o­ries, in the course of talks and prac­ti­cal work and, build­ing on this, have evolved co­her­ent con­cep­tual blue­prints of their own.

Par­tic­i­pants have gained im­por­tant in­sights into their built en­vi­ron­ment in general and into the in­ter­dis­ci­pli­nary input of one of the most for­ma­tive German de­sign­ers of the 20th century in par­tic­u­lar in the course of the study module. They have honed their powers of spatial imag­i­na­tion, ex­panded their general knowl­edge, in­creased their grasp of salient areas of ar­chi­tec­ture, in­te­rior design and product design, as well as of the ways in which they in­ter­mesh, and have also learnt how to in­for­ma­tively present their ma­te­r­ial.

The remit in­volved stu­dents analysing Otl Aicher‘s in­ter­dis­ci­pli­nary work, his texts, ideas and the­o­ries, and using their find­ings to evolve co­her­ent con­cep­tual blue­prints of their own in the form of ex­per­i­men­tal, three-di­men­sional objects, sculp­tures or models.

The scope of Otl Aicher’s in­tel­lec­tual legacy con­fronting the in­ter­dis­ci­pli­nary group of Ar­chi­tec­ture, In­te­rior Design and Product Design stu­dents was such that they ini­tially found it dif­fi­cult to confine them­selves to in­di­vid­ual aspects. In due course, however, the stu­dents’ in­di­vid­ual pro­jects became ever more clearly defined, their variety un­der­lin­ing just how mul­ti­fac­eted Aicher’s work is in its en­tirety.

The par­tic­i­pat­ing stu­dents en­coun­tered no end of stim­u­lat­ing ideas in Otl Aicher’s pro­found texts. They set about finding ma­te­r­ial for con­cepts, texts, product ideas and at the end even for a comic. All of these various ap­proaches were har­nessed to the task of ex­am­in­ing Aicher’s legacy, gauging it against the world of today, and both lauding and crit­i­cis­ing it. In the sphere of in­te­rior design and specif­i­cally the kitchen, Aicher’s teach­ings were ad­judged to still be of great rel­e­vance to the modern age.

Our eyes were ad­di­tion­ally opened by an as­sem­blage drawing on Aicher’s texts to the bar­ri­ers that exist between design and art.

In­ter­dis­ci­pli­nary progress was also made between the three subject areas covered by the project. One In­te­rior Design student was in­spired by Aicher’s work to author an object that would more readily be clas­si­fi­able as product design - a com­puter mouse with a brief to go easy on our tendons.

One par­tic­u­larly mem­o­rable item was a comic about a door handle that reduces bac­te­r­ial trans­mis­sion – an issue that has assumed great im­por­tance lately –by not being very pleas­ant to take hold of. From a philo­soph­i­cal per­spec­tive, too, there were calls to take a new slant on the world as a means of en­hanc­ing one’s life – or, as was argued in one student’s sub­mis­sion, of per­ceiv­ing more than hith­erto.

Aicher’s the­o­ries were even re-ex­am­ined from a sci­en­tific angle. His essay “Grasp­ing with hand and mind” served as a stim­u­lus to extend his pic­tograms to the field of braille. Par­al­lels were un­cov­ered in this way between the dual processes of “grasp­ing with hand and mind” – with ref­er­ence to the vi­su­ally im­paired.

Pos­si­bly one of the most im­pos­ing handle studies yielded an over­sized hand made of blue foam. The half-clenched fist could be gripped in the most diverse of ways and threw up a number of ques­tions re­gard­ing the act of holding: How do we take hold of such an object, what psy­cho­log­i­cal in­sights are gained as a result and what reper­cus­sions does this have for the way we use “han­dle-based objects” in our day-to-day lives?

It was pre­cisely to such com­mon­place objects that we ad­dressed our­selves at a series of meet­ings as well as in the final pre­sen­ta­tion. Every­one in­volved was asked to bring such items along and these were soon being dis­cussed and com­pared with ref­er­ence to the wide variety of ma­te­ri­als in­cor­po­rated, to sport­ing equip­ment handles/grip train­ers and to the passing of time and how this impacts upon design and handles. It can be stated by way of con­clu­sion that Otl Aicher’s legacy is still very much in step with the times and tes­ti­fies to his abiding value, be it in ar­chi­tec­ture, in­te­rior design, product design, graphic design or, indeed, the ed­u­ca­tional and psy­cho­log­i­cal spheres.

Spurred on by what was being loudly called for in com­mer­cial and po­lit­i­cal circles, the Senate of what was then Coburg Tech­ni­cal College decided in Feb­ru­ary 2005 to further expand and in­ten­sify the in­sti­tu­tion’s work in the spheres of Build­ing and Design on its Coburg campus by in­stalling a Design Faculty that ran courses of study for a total of 799 stu­dents (then with a post­grad­u­ate com­po­nent) in Ar­chi­tec­ture, Civil En­gi­neer­ing, In­te­rior Design and In­te­grated Product Design. What is now the Coburg Uni­ver­sity of Applied Sci­ences and Arts thus became the first and to date only higher ed­u­ca­tion es­tab­lish­ment to dis­pense with the or­gan­i­sa­tional bound­aries between the four courses of study re­ferred to, which share a great deal of common ground.

The highly in­no­v­a­tive model adopted by the Design Faculty now ensures that the “in­ter­dis­ci­pli­nary ex­per­tise” ini­tially ad­vo­cated by former Vice-Chan­cel­lor Lindner for those grad­u­at­ing in In­te­grated Product Design will now be ac­quired as a matter of course by stu­dents in any of the four in­ter­re­lated dis­ci­plines in­volved – in the cause of a uni­ver­sity ed­u­ca­tion that is holis­tic, in­ter­dis­ci­pli­nary and prac­ti­cally rel­e­vant.