Select Recognition

• Chevalier de l'Ordre des Palmes Académiques, République française.

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Current CV [pdf] Google Scholar

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Fabienne Münch, PhD, has been chair of the Department of Design at The Ohio State University since July 2022. She brings to the department a balance of professional and academic experience in design environments. From 2013-2017, she taught at the Université de Montréal, where she was the first female elected as director of the School of Design; there, she upheld multiple curricula reforms and new graduate studies programs from conception to implementation. From 2017-2022, she served as Global Executive Director in the Office of the President at the University of Chicago, and subsequently led Global Research Partnerships for the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering. She planned the creation on the Chicago campus of an International Research Center between the French National Scientific Research Agency (CNRS) and the University of Chicago. Prior to joining academia, her professional career was of a future-focused leader across the international landscape, where she led transformative R&D-driven strategies, across a range of multicultural environments. She moved from Paris to the Herman Miller headquarters to lead ethnographic research on workstyle trends in Asia and Latin America. Over the following twelve years, she held various positions in the R&D Department: in the company’s R&D incubator, the Creative Office; as director of the Ideation Studio, the fuzzy front end of R&D, and as the global team leader of the new Mira work chair project. 

Research

Dr Münch’s work focuses today on cross-cultural research in academic and industry environments. Her research interests are aimed at studying multicultural teams tasked with creative projects. She explores the effects of a design management approach, design in action, which values cultural differences as integral parts of the work process. Dr Münch’s most recent work has been focused on Unite!, an alliance of nine EU-based universities aimed at setting a model for a European University. Within the Unite! network, she examines the tenets of shared identity, transdisciplinary knowledge creation and the impact of design activities on multicultural and multilingual teams. More recently, she started investigating the role of designers in the creation of new materials, and particularly, the work of national and international contemporary women designers in soft materials creation.

Active Community and University Service and Leadership

• Provost Council on the Arts, member

Selected Publications

• Bartel-Radic A., Münch, F. (2023). Cross-cultural boundary spanning activities in a global team: insights from an ethnographic case study. International Journal of Cross-cultural Management, Vol. 23, Issue 2. 
• Münch, F. (2016). From Europe to North America to Asia: Overcoming the hurdles of interdisciplinary multicultural teams through design-driven process, International Management, Vol. 20 P38-48 - Canada 
• Münch, F. (2023). Design and good decision making: Faced with human crisis in a simulation game, teams of design students make effective decisions. World Design Organization Conference, Tokyo, Japan.
• Münch, F., Zalkind, M. (2023). Emergence of bottom-up online collaborative initiatives. A case study from the Unite! alliance. Atlas-AFMI Conference, Bordeaux, France.
• Münch, F., Zalkind, M. (2022). Shared identity in culturally diverse groups: learning from the Unite! European alliance. Atlas-AFMI Conference, Nice, France.
• Münch F. (2015). How Design Thinking can augment the Performance of Interdisciplinary Multicultural Teams. Hanoi, Vietnam.
  Books
• Pelletier, L., Münch F., Sand, K. (2024). Design textile actuel (under press). 
• Münch, F.,Zalkind, M. (2023). L’identité partagée dans un groupe culturellement diversifié. Vuibert, Paris (under press). 
• Bartel Radic, A., Münch, F. (2019). Doing Action Research in a global project team. Innovative and alternative research methods in economics and business administration. EIKV-Schriftenreihe zum Wissens und Wertemanagement, Luxemburg. 
• Bartel Radic, A., Münch F. (2017) Gestion de la diversité culturelle : une étude de cas, Management Interculturel, Vuibert, Paris. 

Selected Exhibitions

• “Textile Design Now” exhibition (11/2023 – 02/2024). International exhibition of 23 women designers. Exhibition Co-curator, UQAM Center of Design, Montréal, Canada. 
• “From the workshop to the back alleys” (2016). Exhibition co-curator, La Triennale Internazionale, Milan, Italy.