25 years in the civil service, including more than 12 years at Hof University of Applied Sciences – Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c.. Jürgen Lehmann now congratulated Prof. Torsten Stapelkamp from the Design and Mobility Department. The university president expressed his thanks for their many years of service and hopes for many more years of very good cooperation.
Prof. Stapelkamp works as a creative director, consultant and professor in the fields of interface design and service design. He studied industrial design at the University of Wuppertal, graduating in 1993, and media design at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne. This was followed by appointments at the Universities of Applied Sciences in Bielefeld (2001, teaching interactive media design) and Konstanz (2002, teaching interface design) and at the Macromedia University of Applied Sciences in Munich (teaching media design).
Structure of the media design program
Torsten Stapelkamp has now been teaching at Hof University of Applied Sciences since September 1, 2009. Together with Prof. Frieder Wolfram, who sadly passed away in 2017, he built up the new media design degree program and, as one of the pioneers, additionally established the topics “Service Design Thinking” and “Agile Process Development Strategies”. During this time, opportunities for new and sometimes unexpected experiences kept arising for him, as he recounts in conversation with Campuls-Digital:
“It became clear again and again over two and a half decades that the only constant in life is change. But since design teaching only makes sense anyway if “design” is understood as an ever-changing creative development environment and not just as aestheticizing design, it is all the more important to be able to draw on broad expertise and a wealth of experience as a design teacher,” says Prof. Stapelkamp. This is precisely what he wants to prepare his students for
Students must learn to be able to react to changes from within themselves.”
Prof. Torsten Stapelkamp
Opportunities in Selb as a place of learning
Currently, Prof. Stapelkamp has the opportunity – together with Prof. Lutz Fügener and others to be appointed – to establish a new product design course at the new learning location Selb: “Design and Mobility”. “We will build a new environment here to assess and teach transportation design and mobility in the context of general change. While mobility is primarily change in terms of locomotion, it can also be interpreted in terms of mental mobility,” explains Prof. Stapelkamp.
