Organizers

Martin Jess lives and loves data digitalization. Due to his background in software engineering and data management in combination with art history, he takes a great interest in the intersection between design research and information technology. His passion is to understand innovational strategies and to support and facilitate knowledge discovery by using standardized workflows.

Martin Jess earned a Master of Science from the Martin Luther Universität in Halle. In his ten years of work experience in digitalization as software engineer and data management expert, he contributed in various economic fields. He recently founded, together with his colleague Ulrike Beck, the Dress Research Association.

Before that, he was part of the team for the Swiss Covid-19 Research Project Registry. In his current research he focusses on designing and implementing data management platforms for artefacts in the field of archaeology and art history.

Ulrike Beck is the founder of the Dress Research Association, where she applies innovative scientific methods on primary materials to reveal new insights into the design and production strategies of clothing and explores the interdependencies between the way we dress and our social, cultural and economic context. She conducts research at the intersection of textile and design research as well as data science.

Beck pioneers the field of constructional textile research, which utilizes the compelling logic of the three-dimensional construction of the clothes as an essential dimension to understand strategic problem-solving in the historical and ancient textile industry. Therefore, she developed a new scientific methodology, which combines forensic techniques with those of reverse engineering to extract relevant primary data from the material culture in order to scientifically reconstruct the functional and aesthetic behaviour of the textile finds in motion as well as their fabrication strategies. Beck understands clothing production as a complex task, which is solved by converting creative ideas into a mathematical concept and applying it to a specific problem. 

Therefore, her research focusses on pattern recognition and translating the consistent logical language of the dress into comparable data models.

Ulrike Beck received her PhD in design research at the University of Arts Berlin, where she developed her research methodology. Prior she earned a master’s degree in design from the Burg Giebichenstein, University of Art and Design Halle. With her research, Ulrike Beck collaborates internationally with various Universities, collections, and colleagues from different research fields. Her research results are presented in international journals as well as scientific reconstructed models, installations, graphics and photographs.