The National CollegeDesign Staff
Katharina Pfützner, BDes, ANCAD
Lecturer, Industrial Design
Katharina Pfützner graduated in 1998 from the National College of Art and Design with a B.Des in Industrial Design, as well as a special commendation and a faculty prize.
From 1998 to 2005 Katharina worked in the Irish design industry, winning an Award of Excellence in the 1999 LG Electronics International Design Competition and getting short-listed for the 2000 Glen Dimplex / Institute of Designers of Ireland Design Award, before deciding to return to NCAD in 2002 to focus on researching and teaching. Ordinarily based in the Industrial Design department, she has also taught on undergraduate and postgraduate programs in the Faculty of Visual Culture.
Katharina is currently in the final stages of a PhD project that examines industrial design practice in the German Democratic Republic with a particular focus on social responsibility. She has presented her research at a number of conferences, most recently at the Annual Conference of the Association of Art Historians in Glasgow in 2010. Publications include the book chapters 'Cold, Clean, Meaningless: Industrial Design and Cultural Politics in the GDR 1950-1965' in Contested Legacies - Constructions of Cultural Heritage in the GDR, Edinburgh German Yearbook, vol. 3, eds. Matthew Philpotts and Sabine Rolle (Rochester NY: Camden House, 2009) and '"But a home is not a laboratory": The Anxieties of Designing the Socialist Home in the German Democratic Republic 1950-1965' in Atomic Dwelling: Anxiety, Domesticity, and Postwar Architecture, ed. Robin Schuldenfrei (Routledge, forthcoming).
Katharina is an Associate Researcher at the Graduate School of Creative Arts and Media (GradCAM) and a member of the editorial committee of the peer-reviewed journal Artefact, published by the Irish Association of Art Historians.
