TOBIASLUGMEIER
OFFICE FOR (INDUSTRIAL) DESIGN
University of Applied Sciences Munich /
Deutsches Museum
This educational project shows individual perspectives on where trust happens or disappears - and what we might learn from it when building systems that rely on giving away agency and control in order of technological progress.
TRUST is both a semester project at the university of applied sciences in munich and the resulting exhibition that took place during the Festival der Zukunft 2026 at the Deutsches Museum München, showcasing the work of the 15 participating design students.
→ TRUST will be on show again in February 2027, as a special exhibition at the Science Communication Lab at the Deutsches Museum München
2026
Teaching Assignment @ University of Applied Sciences Munich
Together with Maximilian Münster
Knowledge Production & Transfer, Exhibition Design, Curation, Design Education, Research through Design
Visuals & Photography if not stated otherwise © Tobias Lugmeier
It shapes how we engage with
automated systems, digital platforms, medical procedures, devices, mobility solutions, public institutions, and everyday objects.
We constantly rely on systems we cannot see into.
A navigation device routes us through an unfamiliar city; diagnostic software reads an X-ray more precisely than a clinician. We act on their outputs without acces to how those outputs are produced. Trust here operates as infrastructure: the condition that lets us proceed without verification.
TRUST examines this condition. The project locates where trust is built into technical systems, traces how it shifts from people to infrastructures, and tests what happens when a system exeeds our capacity to model it.
Over one semester, studends of industrial and communication design at the university of applied sciences munich investigated the question through their own design work. The project treats design as a mode of research, a practice that produces knowledge by making and testing artefacts.
The resulting works do more than solve defined problems. Designing desirable futures means we need to examine present conditions and propose possible futures to make trust observable enough to be discussed and acted on.
The results of the project were presented via an Exhibition that took place during the Festival der Zukunft in 2026. The festival annualy returns to the spaces of the Deutsches Museum Munich.
The projects offer individual and at times deeply personal perspectives on trust: where it becomes visible, how it is formed, and where it is lost. Together, they reflect on and negotiate the conditions in which trust plays a fundamental role - providing a starting point for a broader discussion about the core values of a desirable technological future.
The works discuss topics ranging from AI in medicine and QR code interfaces to gender bias in healthcare, alcoholism in society, and attachment formation in early childhood.
A discipline that produces knowledge by making.
Design is treated here as a way of knowledge producing.
A project does not only result in an object or a service - it produces understanding about the situation it works on, carried in sketches, models, tests and the decisions between them.
This is the sense in which design research speaks of knowing through making.
Additionally, students observe the systems they study and also their own position while studying them, including the assumptions they bring and the categories they reach for. This second-order obsercation keeps the observer in account.In which objects and spaces do we find trust, which destroy it - and why? What formal, social, ... factors in products and experiences communicate trust?
(alphabetical order)
Anastasija Miskatovic
Elisa Spaltner
Hendrik Maschauer
Jaee Yi
Janick Entrop
Jasmin Wollner
Johanna Hoepfl
Johannes Bromme
Luca Braun
Marlene Bethkenhagen
Nicole Riess
Olivia Grobe
Sabrina Kapfer
So Young Jang
Wenzel Dube
TRUST will be on display again as a special exhibition in the Science Communications Lab
(Deutsches Museum München) in February 2027.
(Deutsches Museum München) in February 2027.