Katrin Hinz

For me, HTW Berlin is characterised by its versatility, adaptability to fluctuating, yet essential social needs, and the fact that it is often very proactive and adventurous. You can also still clearly see its roots, which lie in East Berlin. In the almost 30 years I have known the university, it has undergone fundamental changes, yet always moved forward in a positive way.

This question is hard to answer, because I have wonderful memories from each phase of my career at HTW Berlin. It’s true that when a new degree programme is established, the first semesters are always the most exciting, as well as the many encounters with young and curious students. Additionally, creating a team of lecturers, seeing its members bond together and subsequently witnessing its first visible successes are formative experiences, but also need the most energy. However, I also really appreciate alumni attending the annual exhibition, the “Werkschau”, sometimes years after graduation, and telling me how much of an impact their studies had on them, or recalling a lecture or project that opened their eyes in a lasting way. Finally, I also very much enjoy welcoming younger colleagues and former alumni who take up design professorships at HTW Berlin. For me, this is an opportunity to exchange ideas with them as equals.

I would certainly include the new campus in Oberschöneweide, a more flexible and interdisciplinary research strategy, the advanced training in higher education for our new professors, a culture of recognition for good teaching and research that is developing increasingly, and digitalisation, which has advanced considerably thanks to the pandemic. For this, however, mutual exchange is also essential, and excellent platforms have been created for this purpose. I know that many at the university would like to see further developments in this area, but I travel a great deal internationally, and it often helps to take a look at your own system from the outside. And believe me, we really are better at this than we often perceive ourselves to be.

One of the most important and memorable successes came in 2004, when the Berlin Senate and the German Science Council released the funds for and approved the construction of the Wilhelminenhof Campus, thus facilitating the consolidation of four locations into one on the Spree. We had fought hard for this for 18 months at all political levels and within the university in its capacity as an executive committee. In my capacity as Vice-President for Research and Transfer and as a trained architect, I had naturally become very involved in this project, which was met with mixed feelings in university circles. Whenever I sit on the terrace of the cafeteria or look out over the Spree from the library reading room, I am overcome with feelings of happiness mixed with pride that we stayed on the ball, and that the young colleagues now use the potential that has grown from this undertaking so naturally. Then there was the Wukro Archaeological Museum in Ethiopia, which we helped to establish with the help of an interdisciplinary team and a funding organisation. More than 20 students from the degree programmes Conservation-Restoration, Communications Design and Industrial Design worked on the project for three semesters, subsequently spending three months on site setting up the exhibition. It was a real adventure, and as thrilling as an Indiana Jones film. However, I, my fellow colleagues and especially the students involved will never forget the pride of the local inhabitants at the museum’s opening, which featured a lavish party with hundreds of guests, and the touching entries in the guest book. Such experiences change the way we look at ourselves and our own culture in the long term.

As a creative person, you are always looking for creative solutions, and bulwarks of bureaucracy like a university are something of a contradiction in terms by contrast. We’re amazingly flexible these days, but when we started out, we faced an unimaginably difficult struggle to assert the needs of creative degree programmes and to impose our own approach, because we were up against a culture shaped purely by engineers and business economists. For that, you need staying power, and you also need to deal with disputes as abstractly as possible and not take everything personally. I pursued my goal of establishing a degree programme in industrial design for 12 years before a door finally opened. Creative thinkers are often spontaneous, but they also employ many systematic methods, which ultimately helps to break down even great resistance.

To be honest, I don’t look back that much. There are always so many exciting new projects to work on, and I find that things always develop in the context of the given framework conditions, which are constantly changing. Today, I would probably be even more radical in defending and promoting the importance of design methods and creativity for innovation and for sustainable teaching, and even for other disciplines, and even more confident in emphasising our successes instead of acting defensively. However, this is no longer as necessary as it was 30 years ago. At that time, the design and culture degree programmes were still described as “orchids in the rock garden of technology” by one of the first presidents in the founding phase, and we were not taken seriously as a result. This has now changed fundamentally, and every era has its particular strategy and approaches. My motto is this: do less looking back and more looking forward towards good ideas for the future, as well as paying attention to and being inspired by other scientific fields.

Ideally, the university would be one large campus, where there would be even less “subject-based thinking”, more curiosity about other areas and otherwise taking the same approach as we do now, namely never standing still and resting on our laurels. I believe that this really is the greatest strength of HTW Berlin. If the spirit remains and there are opportunities for the staff and committed students to shape things, then nothing can really go wrong. I also think that we could become even more international.

First of all, other countries also have very bright children... ;-)! I was also fascinated by the extent to which introducing facets of German design education in countries like India and China has shaped these countries’ view of design teaching. Many people are unaware that, through their very methodical and strategic understanding of design, German institutions such as the Bauhaus and the Ulm School of Design, and also the art colleges in the former GDR, influenced design education worldwide, more than any other European country. It is also important to mention that studying is an enormously privileged and expensive endeavour in all these countries, so students are very diligent, extremely ambitious and much more disciplined than here. You get a lot of gratitude for your own teaching and commitment. I always try to make our students in Germany aware of their privilege in receiving an excellent education for minimum financial outlay. I also emphasise the privilege of being able to develop absolutely freely, without social or societal restrictions as in India or China and also in Egypt. Despite my sometimes critical view of these systems, these countries and their universities are developing at an unimaginable pace, and if we continue to dawdle along as we are doing, we’ll be out of the running in many areas in 20 years’ time. Overall, however, my experiences abroad opened my eyes to how postcolonial our thinking still is, how arrogant we often are and how important it is to keep talking about and truly implementing diversity. Other cultures have different values, traditions and strategies, and it is important to note that ours are not always the best in the end. These experiences have made me focus much more on what is important and how sustainable knowledge transfer and teaching must be. It definitely gave me more courage to venture into the unknown, and to experiment.

To be curious, open-minded and (self-)critical at all costs, both towards yourself and towards what is presented as irrefutable knowledge. And, above all, to acquire methods you can use to constantly generate and evaluate new knowledge as well as apply it. To get out of your comfort zone as often as possible and take risks. All this is much more important than cramming something by heart. Finally, avoid trying to please your lecturers at any price.