Design Research

Prof. Dr. Sarah Owens is an educator and researcher who focuses on the history, practice and mediation of visual artifacts, as well as the social and anthropological aspects of design.

She currently chairs the subject area and directs the graduate programme in Visual Communication at Zurich University of the Arts, where she has been teaching since 2009. She also directs the university's research endeavours in Visual Communication, specialising in the development of new aesthetics, methods, criteria and products. Since 2020, she is president of the Swiss Competence Network for Design Research (SDN). In 2021, she received the prestigious Grand Prix of Design by the Swiss Federal Office of Culture for her work in design education and research.

Sarah Owens is a graduate of the University of Reading, the Royal College of Art in London, the University of Applied Sciences Augsburg and in 2009, was a fellow at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart. She has lectured on her work in Europe, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States, and has edited and contributed to several volumes on design research and theory.

Third-party funded research projects she has led, initiated or collaborated on include the following: Making / Crafting / Designing, Wolfgang Weingart: Typografie in Context, Art.School.Differences, Swiss Graphic Design and Typography Revisited, and Cache: an explorative study on Open Access as a socio-technical system.

Projects in the research unit for Visual Communication encompass basic / empirical research, applied research and humanities (incl. historical) research. The unit initiates and collaborates on projects related to images, typography, type design, visual cultures, visual politics, visibility, hybrid media, archives, historiography, storytelling, data narration, knowledge, perception, social and intercultural communication, social and cultural identity, contemporary design practices, and everyday design.

sarah.owens@zhdk.ch