Themen der Lehrveranstaltung
Work. Work. Work. Working as a Communication Designer Today. In Il mestiere di grafico (1978), Albe Steiner reminds us that becoming a graphic designer means constantly negotiating between the technical demands of the discipline, one's own experience, the cultural and political context, and the people for whom design is ultimately made. This observation remains crucial today: communication design is never merely a formal exercise, nor a purely technical execution, but a situated practice shaped by responsibility, relationships, mediation, and material conditions. Work is never only work. It is discipline and negotiation, desire and fatigue, research and deadline, authorship and compromise. Between otium and negotium — between the time of study, reflection, and intellectual freedom, and the world of obligation, production, and exchange — design takes shape as a practice that is never isolated from society. In opposition to the vanished Eldorado of 1980s studio culture, where the designer’s studio was often imagined as a space of creative freedom, this course approaches visual communication design as a situated profession: one made of relationships, commissions, constraints, public responsibility, and people. Based on this premise, Work. Work. Work. is a course about the fundamentals of communication design, but its core is deliberately a non-theme. Rather than beginning from a single subject, style, or medium, the course begins from work itself: the work of observing, interpreting, designing, presenting, revising, collaborating, and taking responsibility for one’s decisions. Through three real commissions developed with three actual teaching partners, students will encounter the basic conditions of professional design practice and begin to understand what awaits them in the fields of visual communication, cultural production, communication and identity systems, campaigns, public communication, and client-based design. The course treats visual communication not simply as the production of images, but as a relational process. Design shapes how identities, institutions, communities, and narratives become visible, legible, recognizable, or contested. Every project will therefore ask students to consider not only what they are designing, but for whom, with whom, and under which conditions. The designer’s task is not merely to express an idea, but to mediate between contexts: between the inside and the outside, between the personal and the professional, between private research and public form, between intuition and analysis, between the two hemispheres of practice—conceptual thinking and visual execution. Work.work.work is an introduction to design as a profession, but also to design as a way of living with others. It asks students to face the productive friction between autonomy and service, expression and function, sustainability and economic pressure, ambition and care. To become a designer is not only to learn how to make things visible; it is to learn how to work with constraints, with clients, with publics, and with the consequences of one’s choices. The course therefore insists on a simple but demanding idea: design is made through work, and work is made through relationships. To design professionally means learning how to come together, how to negotiate without giving up one’s position, how to sustain a practice without ignoring the conditions that make it fragile, and how to produce communication that speaks not to abstract users, but to people.

Unterrichtsform
The semester is organized around three real briefs, each developed in collaboration with an external partner. These commissions will function as laboratories through which students will progressively acquire the tools, methods, and attitudes of visual communication design. Each brief will introduce different scales, constraints, audiences, and formats, allowing students to work across research, concept development, typography, image-making, layout, identity, presentation, and critical reflection. The course will combine studio work, collective critiques, lectures, workshops, reviews, presentations, and moments of discussion with external guests. International guest lecturers, selected for their relevance to the course’s concerns, will contribute perspectives on professional practice, visual culture, design ethics, commissioning, authorship, and the changing conditions of creative labour. Subject to faculty approval, the course will also include a preparatory educational excursion. This excursion will support the aims of the course by allowing students to encounter design beyond the classroom, through direct observation of professional, cultural, institutional, or production contexts related to the briefs.

Themen der Lehrveranstaltung
Dieses Kursmodul vermittelt den Studierenden umfassende Kenntnisse in den Bereichen Grafikdesign und Visual Storytelling. Es verbindet theoretische Grundlagen mit praxisorientierten Lehrformaten und unterstützt die Entwicklung individueller gestalterischer Projekte. Ziel des Moduls ist es, die visuellen Kompetenzen der Studierenden zu erweitern und ihre gestalterischen Fähigkeiten in den Bereichen Typografie, Visual Identity und Editorial Design zu vertiefen. Dabei setzen sie sich mit konventionellen sowie experimentellen Gestaltungswerkzeugen auseinander und erkunden digitale und analoge Produktionsmethoden. Durch kurze Übungen, Workshops und eigenständige Projekte werden die erlernten Techniken praktisch angewendet und in persönliche gestalterische Prozesse integriert. Ein kollaborativ ausgerichteter Workshop fördert die gemeinsame Entwicklung von Konzepten und mündet in einem kollektiven Gestaltungsergebnis. Darüber hinaus lernen die Studierenden die professionellen Arbeitsschritte eines Designprojekts kennen – von der Analyse des Briefings über die Konzeptentwicklung und Ausarbeitung bis hin zur überzeugenden Präsentation vor Auftraggebern oder Projektpartnern. Die theoretischen Einheiten beschäftigen sich mit unterschiedlichen Formen, Strategien und Methoden des Visual Storytellings. Anhand von Fallstudien und Analysen werden aktuelle Positionen des Grafikdesigns untersucht und kritisch reflektiert. Die Vorlesungen regen zur Auseinandersetzung mit der gesellschaftlichen, kulturellen und politischen Rolle von Grafikdesignerinnen und Grafikdesignern an. Ergänzend bereichern regelmäßig international renommierte Designerinnen und Designer die Veranstaltung durch Gastvorträge und Einblicke in ihre professionelle Praxis.

Unterrichtsform
Vorlesungen, Workshops, Gastvorträge, Gruppendiskussionen, Praktische Übungen, Experimente, Kurzexkursionen, unterschiedliche Formate für Feedback und Review, gegenseitiges Lernen und Lehren

Themen der Lehrveranstaltung
“In the matter of all my books I have always attended to my business. I have attended to it with complete self-surrender”. Taking its cue from this statement by Joseph Conrad, the course will explore the relationship between art and work from theoretical, aesthetic, and practice-based perspectives, providing students with conceptual and methodological tools to critically reflect on their own design practice. The course is structured into three ten-hour parts built around a core bibliography consisting of theoretical texts, films, and literary works, which will be complemented throughout by further readings, images, and other visual materials. (1) The first part will start from the relationship between the ancient world and contemporaneity, examining the original bond between ‘téchne’ and art, as well as the classical dialectic between ‘otium’ and ‘negotium’. Building on this genealogy, we will examine how in contemporary times technique has gradually shifted from being the condition of possibility of the artwork to becoming an autonomous system that organizes production, attention, and experience. Against this background, we will investigate the tensions between creativity and productivity, freedom and functionality, invention and performance that characterize artistic labour today. (2) The second part will focus on the symbolic transition from the assembly line to montage as an aesthetic principle. Beginning with the historical avant-gardes and tracing the development of montage throughout twentieth-century art, we will eventually arrive to cinema and, specifically, to the revolutionary work of Jean-Luc Godard, in whom montage becomes, among other things, a historical-political gesture capable of releasing images, bodies, and memory from the serial logic of production. (3) The final part will examine one of the most radical figures in the relationship between art and work: suspension, refusal, and inoperativity. Beginning with Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street”, we will explore artistic practices in which the suspension of productive action opens up alternative ways of understanding technique, creation, and human action. Alongside lectures, the module will constantly include seminar discussions, close readings, image analysis, and student presentations. Throughout the semester, the module will remain closely connected to the design projects developed in the other studio components, offering methodological and critical perspectives that inform students’ design projects. At the end of the semester, students will choose two theoretical texts, one film, and one literary work, and write a brief critical essay intertwining the themes discussed in class with their own design research.

Unterrichtsform
Alongside lectures, the module will constantly include seminar discussions, close readings, image analysis, and student presentations. Throughout the semester, the module will remain closely connected to the design projects developed in the other studio components, offering methodological and critical perspectives that inform students’ design projects.