ZeM Monograph 04

Collaborative practices are very popular. They emerge as collective, cooperative, co-creative and participatory collaboration in the most diverse discourses and knowledge practices: in companies, organisations or fields of technology, science, art and design. In Drawing Together, Judith Marlen Dobler examines the knowledge culture of collaborative drawing with a practice-led approach and drawing-based research. Following on from her research into laboratory studies in the 1970s, the author visited a scientific laboratory with the question: What is the significance of hand drawing in the 21st century? Using numerous historical and current case studies and an extensive ethnographic field study, she develops a transdisciplinary field for drawing as a collaborative knowledge practice in her book.

Judith Dobler studied design and design theory in Potsdam, Rio de Janeiro and Basel. She has been researching collaborative sketching at the Institute for Arts and Media at the University of Potsdam since 2014. Until 2017, she was a member of the DFG Research Training Group ‘Visibility and Visualisation. Hybrid Forms of Visual Knowledge’ at the University of Potsdam. In addition to her many years of professional experience as a designer, she gives lectures, teaches at universities, organises workshops and publishes in Germany 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 relations.