Meet
@romankarrer , graphic designer, researcher, and occasional editor and publisher. His practice focuses on the development of visual systems and vocabularies, taking forms such as publications, visual identities, websites, maps, and visual research across cultural, architectural, artistic, and pedagogical contexts.
He understands graphic design and the closely related practices of publishing and structuring as an epistemic field, and explores how visual systems, infrastructures, tools, and forms of individual and collective agency shape the production and circulation of knowledge.
Cartographies in Practice – Mapping as Situated Discourse
Co-taught with geographer Pieroni Raphaël, the seminar examines the diversity of maps and their uses across historical and contemporary contexts. It fosters a critical understanding of mapping practices and their regimes of representation, with an emphasis on the analysis and construction of spatio-temporal narratives.
Through research-led collective making, students explore map production as an operative method that oscillates between analysis, translation, and critical knowledge production. Schematic, diagrammatic, and infographic approaches are used as tools for constructing situated arguments.
This semester, in collaboration with
@Amnesty_Suisse and their ongoing global campaign #ProtectTheProtest, students work with datasets of different protests in Switzerland to develop critical visual research. The course is further informed by contributions from guests such as Michaela Mumenthaler (investigative journalist at RTS), Lukas Hamilcaro (architect–illustrator), and other practitioners from related fields.
1: Contre-Courant with and for ALICE Y1, 2020/21.
2: Leaflet for EPFL Architecture PDM 2024, w/ Sandi Gazic.
3: Just City for Urbane Praxis e.V., Berlin 2024.
4+6: The (Real) Book, with and for ALICE Y1, 2019/20.
5: Editorial design for Prix Meret Oppenheim 2025.
7: Monthly program for Floating University Berlin, 2023.
