Research Catalogue

Verena Ziegler is trained as an Architect (Dipl. Ing. Architecture) and a Master of Design and Master of Arts (Textile design) and is a Research Fellow at the University of Arts in Zurich (ZHdK). She is interested in a post humanist, performative research engagement at the interface between science, technology and design.
 Her research examines the role of design, in its different forms of knowing through material, tactile, sensual, perceptive and aesthetic experiences, to contribute towards a more collective understanding within different research frameworks. The research identifies the need to consider the multiplicity of perceived conceptions of reality, to grasp and engage ontological understandings of the world, to unravel limiting viewpoints and interests of contemporary research settings. Design, understood here in an inclusive sense of bringing imminent potential to concrete manifestation, but also as a practice that constructs from the present into the future, can make its own, important contributions to our understanding of the world.

By creating discursive forms of epistemic prototypes with extending notions on ‘perceptional experience’ (Varela, Thompson, Rosch 1991) and ‘aesthetics’ (Baumgarten 1735), her research offers opportunities to examine their aesthetic potential to contribute to modes of knowledge production that include perceptual and sensate knowledge, along with rational modes of understanding, within the process of collective knowledge creation. What matters in the first instance, though, is the process of creation, not a definitive object at any given time.