Designers not only create objects, but also the cultural conditions for innovation, production and use. These large-scaled contexts are juxtaposed with the traditional core competencies of designer activity: working with material, creating artifacts and bringing forth new meaning and purpose as well as original aesthetic experiences. In these processes, material and artifacts each have different meanings.

Helge Oder developed with the «Entwerferische Dinge» an independent concept that describes features and functions of artifacts in an epistemic-oriented design and development process. Further developing Hans-Jörg Rheinberger's approach to «Epistemisches Ding» (literally «epistemic thing»), the aesthetic «Arbeit an der Form» (literally «work on the form») is emphasized as an independent process of cognition and unique design. Artifacts are created. These are not only experienced as containers for ideally prefabricated content or technical functional contexts but as «Designer things» represent qualitative and development steps that cannot be realized in another way that affirm the expertise and competence of professional stakeholders (for example in regional companies) and at the same time encourage their further development. Collaboration is thereby initiated and moderated.

Within the module Design Process, the concept of «Entwerferischen Dinge» was applied to individual topics and questions of the workshop participants. The focus laid on the novel application of design competencies based on the students’ experience. The starting point is a pre-existing design project of workshop participants, which was developed further through the perspective of «Entwerferische Dinge»; the goal being to develop 2D and 3D artifacts as a reliable aesthetic foundation for an insight-oriented design process that can be opened up to different stakeholders.