Dietmar R. Winkler, educated in design in Hamburg, Germany,
is professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts
Dartmouth. He believes that design theory cannot be separated
from evolving contemporary and future professional practices.
He was director of the Institute of Design at IIT, the director of
the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign, and also held the Joyce C. Hall-Chair as
director of the Center for the Study of Form, Image, and Text at
the Kansas City Art Institute. As part of this assignment, he was
also in charge of the KCAI Illustration Program, which at that
time prided itself of the highest enrollment in relationship to all
other programs in either fine or applied arts.

Prior, for approximately twenty years, he was a senior faculty
member of the Design Department, the dean of the College of
Visual and Performing Arts, and an adjunct faculty member in
the cognitive science program of the Psychology Department at
the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. In 1974 he rewrote
and upgraded the graduate curriculum, which he administrated
for a number of years.

Since 1960, he has been examining professional design
practice and the education of design and communication
subjects. His interdisciplinary interests have been to expand
narrow traditional visual and form/function literacies to include
user-based design in behavioral, social, and cultural contexts.
He was a member of the editorial board of advisors to Visible
Language journal for which he has written on design and
educational issues. Other papers have appeared in publications
of AIGA, ICOGRADA, and TipoGrafica.

In his uninterrupted practice, he has worked as type and design
director, responsible for the development and implementation of
various long-term publication programs, identity systems, and
design and production staffing plans at Brandeis University,
Harvard Business School, Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, as well as
the WGBH Educational Foundation. His design work has been
awarded, exhibited, and published by art director clubs of
Boston, New York, and St. Louis, the Type Directors Club of
New York, the American Institute of Graphic Arts. Reviews and
visual presentations have also appeared in publications and
books of the national and international professional media: Art
Direction, Communication Arts, Graphis (Switzerland), Idea
magazine (Japan), Novum Gebrauchsgrafik (Germany), Print,
among others.