Dr. Judith Dobler

is an investigation into drawing in the sciences and deals with an analog practice, drawing with paper and pen, which is practiced unchanged in a time of technological developments and digital techniques. Surprisingly, manual drawing is a current and widespread practice in the natural sciences that spreads informally and remains invisible outside of the scientific laboratories. The surprise stems from the fact that the natural sciences laboratories are primarily technological environments where sensitive imaging instruments are used. In laboratories there are highly sensitive digital cameras and detectors, graphic simulation programs and image evaluation tools as well as graphic software that can be used to create images for scientific publications.

So there are plenty of picture devices available in places of science, and yet people draw with their hands on tables, on blackboards and in notebooks. Another observation is that everyday scientific life is mainly organized in working groups, where drawing takes place as a collective activity. In addition, collaborative drawing is embedded in a multitude of media, spatial and technical arrangements and is formed depending on the problem context. The graphic collaboration is known from design research and appears unexpectedly in scientific practice that is not assigned to the classic design disciplines of architecture, design or engineering.

This is where the dissertation comes in: With drawing as an analog cognitive process in digital environments and the opening of the individual act of drawing to a collective design act, virulent research topics of the present are invoked on forms of knowledge, media practices and collaboration activities. From a practical design position, gaps and gaps in the theoretical discourse on current drawing practice are addressed and arguments are made for new theoretical and methodological approaches to drawing as a practice of knowledge.

Judith Dobler studied design and design theory in Potsdam, Rio de Janeiro and Basel. Since 2014 she has been researching collaborative sketching at the Institute for Arts and Media at the University of Potsdam. Until 2017 she was a member of the DFG graduate school “Visibility and Visibility.Hybrid forms of image knowledge” at the University of Potsdam. In addition to her many years of professional experience as a designer, she gives lectures, teaches at universities, organizes workshops and publishes at home and abroad. She lives and works in Berlin. Her research topics include epistemes of drawing, collaborative design practices, embodied knowledge practices, as well as diagrammatics and text-image relationships.

You can visit personal website of Dr. Judith Dobler here.