During his time at the Hochschule Niederrhein, he was impressed and influenced right at the beginning, in one of his first lessons as a student, by Prof. Peter Wörfel and his infectiously positive outlook. But he also has fond memories of Prof. Georg Kirchberger, who always believed in him. Equally well remembered from this time is "Behechti's flea market", because through Prof. Sachsses co-worker Djahangir Behechti always and for every camera the right spare part was found. In the Faculty of Design at that time, carpenters with sophisticated design ambitions were typical representatives of the students, and Klaus Kuenen - like many other alumni - fondly remembers the couple in the cafeteria on Petersstraße who conveyed the feeling of being a guest at grandma's for coffee.
For Klaus Kuenen, design is his intrinsic motivation, and in his professional beginnings he certainly served the typical clichés of "creatives" with a late start to the day in exchange for long, never-ending evenings of cold pizza and weekend parties. The unease he already felt during his studies about the economic approach to projects was intensified by the business economists and the feeling arose that they even wanted to intervene in the creative processes. However, Klaus Kuenen's unease then gave rise to a desire to get to know and understand this other world, and he immersed himself in the world of management consulting. It was a culture shock, not only because the world now failed to consist of Excel, numbers, reporting, MS Project, Power Point and meetings, but desks were tidied, overtime had to be approved and people turned up at "proper" after-work parties in suits and ties. This is where the change began, namely the feeling of wanting to scientifically substantiate everything to do with design. A first doctoral project, in a model project on doctorates at universities of applied sciences in North Rhine-Westphalia in 2001, failed because the topic was rejected as not relevant for research. Incidentally, the topic was the acceptance of augmented reality....
Assignments led him into the world of eCommerce and webshops, all still in their infancy, and the world of disruptive innovations and he also took teaching assignments for lectures at universities e.g. on corporate psychology. During a sabbatical in 2014, Klaus Kuenen once again started a PhD, this time on the topic of "Disruptive innovations from a design science perspective", and successfully defended it. A year later, he then applied for an advertised professorship and now teaches at the Hochschule für Medien, Kommunikation und Wirtschaft in the business department in Cologne.
As a student, he was once asked what design was to him, and his answer at the time still holds true today: "Design is what I do - my intrinsic motivation."
More about the curriculum vitae of Prof. Dr. Klaus Kuenen
