Thought Made Material: The Model between Design Process and Museum Collection

The book reflects the design model as the basis for future concepts, as a collector’s item in a museum and in its actual function as a planning and work tool for designers and model builders. Text in English and German.

Design models are an integral part of the design process, as prototypes and providers of ideas for those products that are later launched on the market as serial and mass goods. However, working with models is an interdisciplinary undertaking: The book reflects the design model as the basis for future concepts, as a collector’s item in a museum and in its actual function as a planning and work tool for designers and model builders.

Text in English and German.

Matthias Wagner K is one of the outstanding German-speaking representatives in the fields of design mediation and design curating. After many years of successful freelance work as an exhibition organizer, biennial director, art and design curator, editor and author, he has been director of Frankfurt’s Museum Angewandte Kunst since 2012. Wagner K has been teaching design curating at the HfG Offenbach since 2015/16 as part of a teaching assignment, and since June 2018 he has been an honorary professor in the Design Curating and Criticism theory program. Grit Weber has been Deputy Director of the Museum Angewandte Kunst in Frankfurt am Main and Curator of Design, Art and Media since 2015. After studying art history, she worked primarily as a journalist and editor-in-chief in the cultural sector. From 2019 to 2022, she was a lecturer in design and cultural history at the RheinMain University of Applied Sciences in Wiesbaden. At the museum, she combines cross-genre aesthetic and social issues in numerous projects. Among other things, she deals with the history of the Frankfurt School of Arts and Crafts, the New Frankfurt of the 1920s and contemporary aspects of design. The most recent exhibitions she curated were Ars Viva’21: Rob Crosse, Richard Sides, Sung Tieu (2020), Mythos Handwerk. Zwischen Ideal und Alltag (2022) and Kramer lieben: Objekte. Architektur. Film. Kunst. Gespräch (2023).