Prof. Carl Frech
Design, conception, draft
carl.frech@thws.de
Carl Frech studied visual communication at Berlin University of the Arts. He then worked for MetaDesign AG for eleven years, finally as board member and until 2002 significantly involved in the expansion of the company into new areas of activity.
Today Carl Frech is a strategic consultant, partner and chairman of the supervisory board of Fuenfwerken Design AG. He is a co-founder of Intuity Media Lab GmbH and was the initiator and chairman of NEXT AT eG, a project-oriented association of companies in the areas of design, communication and media. Together with Jeremias Schmitt and Fuenfwerken Design he is also an initiator and co-founder of 5Wx new ventures GmbH, in the field of innovation and business development, as well as co-founder and partner of dreizeichen-verlag GbR.
He is a consultant and moderator for industry in general and for companies in the so-called creative industry. He gives lectures and workshops on the subjects of innovation, design and communication.
Among various voluntary activities, Carl Frech is a co-founder and member of gestaltBildung eV, member of the International Design Center Berlin and on the board of trustees of CREATE BERLIN eV.
Carl Frech was chairman of the jury of the Austrian funding programmes departure CLASSIC and FOKUS, and is now an innovation consultant for the Austrian creative industry and on the advisory board of Sclable Business Solutions GmbH in Vienna.
In 2015 Carl Frech joined the advisory board of the M.Sc. in international business management at the Berlin School of Economics and Law.
He has taught at the School of Design Thinking (d.school) at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam since May 2011. Today he is the institute’s senior advisor general, and particularly active in its advanced-track programme.
A professor of design and conception at the University of Applied Sciences in Würzburg since, Carl Frech focuses on innovation, design thinking, business design, open innovation and marketing strategies.
He lives with his family in Berlin.
My approach to teaching is easily described: it’s about participation, thinking ahead and laterally, and advancing into issues that will become socially important. The world will surely have to change, and our task in design will be need to respond. The focus is always on human beings and their lived realities. Understanding this is the starting point and pivot of every development.
My favourite quotation from Kurt Marti, a Swiss author and clergyman who died in February 2017, best expresses my ideal of all design:
Where would we be, if everyone said
where would we be, and no one looked
to see where we were
when we went