Heike Nehl and Sibylle Schlaich taught as guest pro­fes­sors in China at the CDK (the Chi­nese Ger­man Art Acad­emy in Hangzhou) – a co­op­er­a­tion pro­ject be­tween the UdK Berlin (Berlin Uni­ver­sity of the Arts) and the CAA (Chi­nese Art Acad­emy), their work con­cerned the sub­ject of air­ports and new cre­ative ap­proaches to vastly dif­fer­ent fields of de­sign. Their lec­tures in­cluded all com­mu­ni­ca­tion me­dia em­ployed at an air­port, in­fo­graph­ics, ori­en­ta­tion sys­tems, the cor­po­rate de­sign of an air­port, the cor­po­rate de­sign of an air­line, dig­i­tal me­dia such as apps, in­fo­graph­ics on the air­field and the graph­i­cal use of space.

Un­der the su­per­vi­sion of Heike Nehl and Sibylle Schlaich, a group of stu­dents were chal­lenged to re­search the po­ten­tials of in­for­ma­tion de­sign. The brief was to crit­i­cally ex­am­ine this par­tic­u­lar topic for its spec­trum of pos­si­ble ap­pli­ca­tions, to ex­plore the every­day and mul­ti­ple uses. The stu­dents’ re­sults em­pha­sise the im­por­tance of sys­tem­atic in­for­ma­tion graph­ics for all ar­eas of our life and so­ci­ety. In this con­text, sci­en­tific data, in­struc­tion man­u­als, cal­en­dars, along with in­ter­ac­tive pro­grams and ex­per­i­men­tal films have been vi­su­alised.

The lec­ture given by Sibylle Schlaich and Heike Nehl at the Vi­sion Plus Con­fer­ence of the IIID (In­ter­na­tional In­sti­tute for In­for­ma­tion De­sign) in Vi­enna is about de­sign­ing pic­tograms within an in­ter­na­tional and his­tor­i­cal con­text. Pic­tograms are an im­por­tant part of com­mu­ni­ca­tion at an air­port in that they help to over­come lan­guage bar­ri­ers. They in­flu­ence the vi­sual iden­tity, be­cause they com­mu­ni­cate in a lan­guage which fits to each par­tic­u­lar air­port and coun­try. It is in­ter­est­ing how their mo­tifs, aside from the de­sign and char­ac­ter­is­tics, al­ways change to match the needs and cir­cum­stances. Stan­dards, DIN stan­dards and test pro­ce­dures help to check and to stan­dard­ise com­pre­hen­si­bil­ity and rec­og­niz­abil­ity.