My work in teaching, workshops, lectures and mentoring is guided by a simple principle: helping people to help themselves. I do not teach design as a collection of ready-made solutions, but as a tool that enables people to recognise, question and develop their own position. My work focuses on narrative, strategic and multisensory design, and on the question of how fractures, uncertainties and apparent weaknesses can open up new possibilities for action and change. I explore these ideas in regular webinars for GEMA, addressing topics such as corporate design and artistic positioning, material psychology, multisensory design, digital stages and AI, as well as crisis, communication and repositioning. At universities such as the Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach, I work with students on artistic positioning, narrative and strategic design. In schools and cultural institutions, I develop formats such as True Crime – Creative Writing, Illustration, Design & Publishing, in which young people create their own narratives while learning to critically reflect on the ethical, creative and strategic decisions behind them. Beyond teaching, I am involved in the selection process for scholarships at the German Academic Scholarship Foundation (Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes) and serve as a mentor in EXIST-WOMEN, a programme supporting women on their path towards entrepreneurship and self-employment. The Stülp Approach A methodological foundation of my work is the Stülp Approach, which I developed as a way of thinking about transformation. Stülp does not regard weaknesses, contradictions, fractures or imperfections simply as deficits to be corrected. Instead, they can become raw material for change — and sometimes even the necessary condition for a new direction or a new beginning. Not every crisis requires optimisation. Sometimes something needs to be looked at differently, reinterpreted, turned inside out or fundamentally reassembled. Stülp therefore does not begin by asking: “How can I become better?” It begins with another question: “What is the thing that isn’t working trying to show me?” From this perspective, apparent weaknesses can reveal where existing structures, narratives or assumptions no longer work. They can become indicators of where change is necessary — whether in personal and artistic positioning, brands and institutions, creative processes or professional biographies. As a lecturer and mentor, my role is therefore not to provide a finished answer. I want to give people the tools to recognise connections for themselves, to read their own stories differently and to develop independent decisions from what they discover. The aim is not necessarily to turn a weakness into a strength, but to understand what the weakness makes visible. For me, this is where design becomes a form of empowerment: not designing solutions for people, but enabling them to develop their own. This is the essence of Stülp as help for self-help.