I am a designer, photographer, and design educator. My work follows one conviction: design is a democratic and social force. It makes the invisible visible, gives people a voice, and turns complex challenges into something we can shape together.
I hold a Diplom in Visual Communication from the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK), where Joachim Sauter taught me to think of design as an interactive, process-based practice. Before that I studied communication design in Wiesbaden, and between 1999 and 2004 I worked as a designer for agencies including Heine/Lenz/Zizka and Nokia, receiving several design and photography awards.
The decisive part of my path began in 2006, when I followed my heart to Bogotá. For fourteen years I was Professor of Design and Photography at the Universidad de los Andes – in a context where design shapes social reality directly and where participatory methods are lived practice. There I realized public interventions on questions from sexual education to the peace process, and created the "Design Challenges": intensive 24-hour workshops built on collective intelligence rather than the lone designer. From 2012 to 2019 I also led the faculty's communications and publications department, designing more than twenty books on design research.
Since 2021 I have been Professor of Media Design at IU Internationale Hochschule in Mainz, researching design as a democratic force. I expanded the Design Challenges into the nationwide Design Camps for our students. From these grew the Design Democracy Camp – a transdisciplinary and more inclusive continuation that opens design beyond the university to everyone, nominated as one of 350 projects worldwide for World Design Capital Frankfurt RheinMain 2026. With my expert network "How to Spark", I led a project at the Liselotte-Gymnasium in Mannheim on mental wellbeing: from a survey of 1,160 people, 178 stakeholders co-created concrete changes – among them a petition that secured a permanent school social worker. In my teaching, students develop campaigns against digital violence together with the NGO HateAid.
My practice combines participatory methods – deep listening, mapping, co-creation, design thinking – with quantitative research and practice-based inquiry: designing as a way of researching. Photography remains integral to how I see. My long-term project "The Paradox of Ugliness" (book, 2016) explored the beautiful appearance of the ugly and the ugly appearance of the beautiful; my photographic work has been published internationally and exhibited in Berlin, Hannover, and Bogotá.
I work in German, English, and Spanish, and move naturally between international and local contexts, disciplines, and audiences.