Profile

Currently Julia is Professor for practical philosophy and cultural Philosophy at University of applied Sciences in Darmstadt, Germany; she is affiliated with the European University of Technology and runs her own consultant business for art & design projects. She also is member of the AICA (German Section) – the international Association of Art Critics. 


Julia was awarded doctor of philosophy in 2012 from Goethe University Frankfurt/M. after studying philosophy, art history and archaeology in Frankfurt/M. and at the Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg and the University of Basel, Switzerland; additionally she holds a postgraduate degree in cultural and media practice from the Institute for German Literature and Didactic in Frankfurt/M. 


Originally coming from the philosophy of mind and language with strong interest in the realism-antirealism issue as it is linked to questions of truth, Julia is specializing in the field of practical philosophy and art and design philosophy. Here she is most interested in the combination of empirical and philosophical findings in aesthetics and the interconnection of aesthetics and ethical dimensions. The feasibility of sustainability goals such as inclusion, diversity and ecological resource conservation specifically in the context of art, design and technology has a growing influence on her thinking. 


She has taught and researched on these fields at various academic institutions: as a Max-Planck Scholarship holder at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History in Frankfurt/M., as a visiting researcher at the faculty of Philosophy at the University of Oxford (UK) and as Mathilde-Planck Scholar at the University of applied Sciences Konstanz,  at the Basel Academy of Arts and Design, within the BMBF Professorship-program at the Institute of Design Research in Darmstadt and as a Visiting Professor at the University of Arts and Design in Offenbach.  


Besides her academic engagement and writing Julia is a major art lover, she is a collector herself and has been active as an entrepreneur in the arts and design sector for years. She was Co-founder of the arts magazine Critica, focusing on the critical review of contemporary art, architecture and design and is engaging in her own gallery and studio business for art and design projects since 2015. She has realized exhibitions and art projects internationally in cooperation with museums and institutions including artists and designers like Sandra Mann, Gerhard Richter, Edward Ruscha, Christine De la Garenne, Superrr Lab, Tobias Rehberger, Christiane Feser, Bettina Poustschi and many many more. 

Projects

Materialization of Fairness

Gender in Design & Tech (Barbara Budrich Publishing coming up 2024)

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.

Ethico Project 

Horizon Europe (project member , project ended 2023)

Was an Erasmus + project of the European University of Technology. The main Idea was that Ethics traditionally understood as applied ethics is not equipped to deal with the questions posed by the relation between technological development and ecology. The application of pre-existing ethical frameworks has not led to the desired results and has been reduced to the introduction of ethics onto the engineering degree programs. This is partly to the cultural contexts of technological innovation and on the other hand to the sheer speed of technological change. The EthiCo project developed specific methodologies of the ethics and ecology within the education not just of engineers but all students within higher education and also a teacher training module for the teaching and integration of ethics into the curriculum (including engineering, natural sciences, business, arts and humanities). https://www.univ-tech.eu/projects 

Design & Gender

(E-book, Institute of Design Research)

This is a small open access book about the issues that women have to face today in product design – from education to praxis. In addition to a historical outline of the problem, it contains above all presentations of the work of internationally successful women designers as well as the evaluation of a series of interviews with women designers that shed light on unconscious mechanisms of genderization and their consequences. The basic idea was to provide an incentive to engage with contemporary product worlds and their female creators and not only with the male icons of design which is exactly what happens very often in design education due to a lack of proper material. 

Philosophy and Design

Erschienen im Transcript Verlag

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. 

Aesthetics / Design / Art

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

Philosophy and Design

E-book, Institute of Design Research

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. 

Das Realitätsproblem bei Jürgen Habermas

und die Philosophie des Pragmatismus (Karl Alber, Freiburg/München)

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.

julia-constance dissel 

photos Sandra Mann

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