An invitation, a prompt, a script, a dialogue, a play—these are the performative gestures through which Ruller’s design practice unfolds. Such an approach instigates events that connect participants and facilitate interactions. Her research inhabits the threshold where communication design ceases to be only an aesthetic surface and begins to act as an event.
The central question is: ‘How’ and ‘why’ to design toward the happening? To address this, Ruller aims to define what a design happening is and how it empowers its constituents to find, hold on to, and express their agency in doing things and being together otherwise.
Historically, communication design emerged from graphic design as a discipline closely tied to print technologies, characterized by flatness. Since then, it has evolved into a dispersed and autonomous field, circulating across digital networks, platforms, and interfaces. Within this context, design happening research expands towards an experimentation with ‘eventness’, bodily experience, and autoethnographic inquiry.
To what extent can making ‘toward’ and ‘through’ performance be understood as a research method that produces embodied situations and facilitates social events? How might perspectives and strategies from ‘participatory design’ and ‘action art’ frame ‘design happenings’ as relational, processual, and playful? And how might all this contribute to identifying the agencies, connections, and possibilities of various bodies inside such situations—treating these as enacted, dialogical, political, and open negotiations?
Tereza Ruller (she/her) (*1987, Czechoslovakia) identifies as a mother, communication designer, experimenter, and educator.
In her practice, The Rodina, she investigates performative and critical approaches to communication design. Her transdisciplinary methods emphasize the agency of playfulness, active spectatorship, and the relations between human and nonhuman actors. Engaging with the ecological and social urgencies of our time, she seeks to foster collective reimagination through graphic design.
Ruller’s work operates within cultural contexts—blending research, participatory events, spatial installations, virtual environments, and visual identities.
She is a Professor of Communication Design and Digital Practices at HfG Karlsruhe (DE) and a Critical Narratives tutor in the MA Information Design at Design Academy Eindhoven. Alongside her regular teaching, she frequently lectures and leads workshops internationally—for example at ZHdK (CH), CalArts (USA), RCA (UK), and CSM (UK).