Lisa Baumgarten is a critical design mediator – a designer, researcher, writer and teacher/learner.
She is the co-creator of the participatory research platform Teaching Design which focuses on design education from intersectional feminist and decolonial perspectives. In the course of the platform Lisa has been facilitating a conversational series together with Judith Leijdekkers funded by the Stimuleringsfonds and authors/edits an infrequent newsletter on design education. Lisa has been teaching design theory and practice as adjunct lecturer at German and international design universities since 2017. From Oct 2022–Aug 2023 Lisa was a guest professor at Studiengruppe Informationdesign (Communication design) at Burg Giebichenstein, University of Art and Design Halle. From Oct 2021–Sep 2022 Lisa held a position as interim professor of Design Sciencesat the Institute of Design Research at Braunschweig University of Arts where she facilitated seminars in the M.A. program Transformation Design. In recent years she has been invited to conceptualise and facilitate workshops and conversational formats for creative practitioners, educational and cultural institutions, such as the Stimuleringsfonds, The Design Museum Gent, the Whitechapel Gallery London, Teaching Design, Kunst- und Gewerbemuseum der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin, re:publica, Estonian Academy of Arts as well as the Umeå Institute of Design – surrounding topics of power asymmetries, working towards safe(r) spaces, fair and collective practices. Lisa’s workshops center around norm-critical and intersectional feminist approaches. Her current research focuses on design education, its entanglements with colonial continuities and teaching/learning practices as institutional critique. Lisa’s research and writing has been published and presented amongst others at Attending [to] Futures Conference at KISD Cologne, Creative Bodies—Creative Minds Conference (Graz), Designsymposium Kompliz*innen at BURG Halle, the The German Society for Design Theory and Research (DGTF) as well as form design magazine. Her most recent published paper is asking how design education can mediate that the world concerns all of us.