Julia-Constance Dissel

Women are still under-represented in tech and design areas and therefore their demands often neglected or overseen, we know that efforts need to be made to address the gender gap at all levels in academia and the workplace. For young researchers and professionals the amount of material on gender theories etc., the issues arising when dealing with tech and design from unilateral and stereotypical perspectives have grown in number over the last years. Unfortunately, only the “bad” side often gets into focus. What is lacking are the presentation of the materialization of real changes and the mechanisms used for this. This book is meant to show such efforts and projects from academia to industry and from product design to engineering also highlighting the interrelation between educational, social, economic and ecological factors in the pursuit not for plain equality but gender fairness.

I have been presenting findings from my research on aesthetics and writing articles during the last years on the aesthetics mainly of design and the interrelation of aesthetics and ethics that were published in diverse media. If you are interested in one of these topics, presentations or articles I’d be happy to share.
Here’s a selection:

• Speculative Design & Diversity, University of applied arts Basel Switzerland, 2023
• Diversity in Design Studies, University of applied arts Basel Switzerland, 2022
• Gender Equality & Diversity in Design conference Schader Foundation Darmstadt 2021
• Gender Equality and Diversity in Design Teaching, New European Bauhaus Conference, HBK Saar 2021
• Design & Humanism (2021), HFG, Offenbach 
• Design Aesthetics between Aisthesis and Cognition , Academy of Arts, Stuttgart 2020 Articles 
• Form und Funktion. Eine kritische Betrachtung zeitgenössischer Designästhetik, Schwerpunktthema Design & Philosophie in: deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie DZPhil 2020; 68(3) , S. 410-424.
• Philosophische Ästhetik und Design, in: Daniel Feige, Florian Arnold, Markus Rautzenberg (Hrsg.): Schriftenreihe des Weißenhofinstituts zur Architektur- und Designtheorie: Die Philosophie des Designs, transcript Verlag 2020, S 307-326
• With all senses – Perspectives in Design Aesthetics / Mit allen Sinnen. Positionen der Designästhetik, in: Form, Nr.284, Region of Design, July/August 2019, S. 97-101. (English/German)
• Philosophie und Design. Eine Einleitung, in: Design und Philosophie, Schnittstellen und Wahlverwandtschaften, transcript Verlag, 2017 , S. 6-17

This book (anthology) is gathering insights into the philosophically long neglected entanglement of philosophical thoughts and the design discipline in general as it refers more to the daily and routinized experiences within live worlds. It deals with the neglect of everyday worlds by philosophy as a theory of art but also with ethical aspects in design. 

This was my first book which was published in 2013 and awarded by the Geschwister Boehringer Ingelheim Stiftung für Geisteswissenschaften , it critically investigates the workability of discourse theory of truth after the relevant modifications that Jürgen Habermas made in “Wahrheit und Rechtfertigung” in regard of questions concerning the realism-antirealism problematic. It mainly focuses on the truth and communication theory but therefore also critically examines the influencing factors from the pragmatisms of Wittgenstein, Hillary Putnam and Richard Rorty. The book is a plea for a wider understanding of representationalism which is underpinned in reference to the epistemology of Charles Sanders Peirce.