Bielefeld UAS becomes HSBI – Fachhochschule Bielefeld turns into Hochschule Bielefeld

Bielefeld (hsbi). Fachhochschule Bielefeld – University of Applied Sciences is a thing of the past. As of Wednesday, 19 April 2023, the largest university of applied sciences in East Westphalia-Lippe (Ostwestfalen-Lippe, OWL) with its 10,500 students and 900 employees has a new name, which is as follows: Hochschule Bielefeld – University of Applied Sciences and Arts (HSBI). Together with Bielefeld’s mayor Andreas Rüther, the President of HSBI, Prof. Dr. Ingeborg Schramm-Wölk, revealed the new lettering on the university’s main building and subsequently answered the media’s questions.

Profile developed, scope of work expanded – HSBI as a talent factory

“Our new name reflects the expansion that the university’s scope of work has seen over the years,” said the President. “Today’s HSBI has long outgrown the Fachhochschule that it used to be. It stands for the educational system’s permeability and offers talented individuals with different school, job and academic biographies the chance to develop. We enable them to graduate with bachelor’s, master’s or doctoral degrees and offer them diverse formats of academic further education. Apart from application-oriented teaching for different target groups, we are also successful in our research and transfer activities and have continuously increased our third-party funding over the past few years. In this context, we see our new name as an expression of our more differentiated profile and as a sign that we intend to consequently move forward on the path we have taken. Because we are facing many exciting challenges – for example in the areas of digitalisation and internationalisation, but also in coping with demographic change and the climate crisis.”

On the occasion of the name change, Mayor Rüther highlighted the importance of the former “FH,” as it was commonly known for decades, and today’s HSBI for the city of Bielefeld and the entire OWL region: “It is HSBI that makes Bielefeld a university city together with Bielefeld University. HSBI is a talent factory for the region’s employers who are dependent on well-educated specialists and managers. The study programmes’ orientation towards practical application ensures that small and medium-sized businesses as well as the region’s big players, administrations and the health-care sector closely cooperate with HSBI. This applies both to the work-integrated and part-time study programmes and to the collaboration activities in research and development. If HSBI goes further along this path, it will continue to have the success it deserves!”

Riza Öztürk: Name change as a symbol of renewal – also internationally

Prof. Dr. Riza Öztürk, Dean of HSBI’s Bielefeld School of Business and mobile marketing expert, welcomed and encouraged the university’s name change from the outset: “The introduction of the new HSBI brand is a symbol of renewal for Hochschule Bielefeld, as is the introduction of the new corporate design. It makes us more visible in a more contemporary way, both within the city itself and in the whole region. Especially online, the new brand works much better than our previous concept. This way, we can now start optimising our digital channels. This includes, for example, that we will make all the important information on our website available in English, too, in order to be more attractive for students and early-stage researchers from other countries.”

Large majority within the university’s Senate in favour of name change

Since the early 2000s, universities of applied sciences in Germany have been renaming themselves due to the changed nature of their profiles. Hochschulen für angewandte Wissenschaften, or simply Hochschulen, has become the established term in place of Fachhochschulen. On a national level, Bielefeld UAS was one of the last remaining universities of applied sciences to carry out this process. German legislation has also taken this change into account. In North Rhine-Westphalia’s Higher Education Act, for example, Fachhochschulen are nowadays predominantly called Hochschulen für Angewandte Wissenschaften.

The university’s name change is based on a decision by the Senate that was passed with a large majority. The Senate is the university’s highest decision-making body in which all status groups are represented: professors, non-professorial teaching staff, students as well as technical and administrative staff and employees in the central units. The decision was made after several years of discussion during which the majority gradually – and recently very clearly – shifted towards those could no longer identify with the concept of Fachhochschule.

A major project for everyone involved

The previous English component of the university name (University of Applied Sciences) received the addition “and Arts” – this intends to reflect the Faculty of Design and Art’s design programmes and the Faculty of Minden Campus’s architectural programmes.

The decision to rename the university was already made in June 2021. More than 18 months of intensive work have passed between the Senate’s decision and the introduction of the new name. “Essentially, there are two reasons for that,” said Dr. Lars Kruse, Head of HSBI’s Communications Office and overall project lead for the renaming process. “On the one hand, preparations for the renaming were a major project that required joint efforts of all those involved at the university – from the Registrar’s and Examination Office, to IT and Facility Management, from the financial and legal departments to the Communications Office. On the other hand, a new name also required an updated corporate design. For this, a creative team had to be formed and an agreement on how great the change should be had to be reached.” At the end of this process, the responsible persons decided to take a big leap: the agency Markwald Neusitzer Identity created a new logo, new fonts and a new colour scheme inspired by nature. “We wanted to design a look that is timeless and will work for HSBI for a long time,” said Nina Neusitzer, head of the agency.

New logo inspired by the main building’s façade

The university’s new name “Hochschule Bielefeld – University of Applied Sciences and Arts” is a mixture of German and English. In everyday life, university members will speak of “Hochschule Bielefeld” or just use its abbreviation HSBI, pronounced in the German or English way. The new logo is based on this abbreviation and thus helps make the new name more prominent.

There will not be a new figurative logo (such as the previously used logo resembling a staircase). Instead, the design team created a special word mark. Characteristic features of the new logo are the misaligned letters “H” and “I” and the single vertical element between “HS” and “BI” that simultaneously separates and combines the words they stand for – “Hochschule” and “Bielefeld.”

These graphic elements are inspired by the façade of HSBI’s main building on the northern edge of Bielefeld Campus with its diverse, differently coloured vertical elements that form a pattern. For his façade design, the artist Josef Schwaiger had “translated” the amplitudes of brain waves – as depicted in an EEG – into this abstract pattern. “Nothing can depict a university’s activities better than brain waves, and this is one of the reasons why we were inspired by these vertical elements when we designed the new university logo,” said Nina Neusitzer.

OWL-wide campaign to announce the new university name

Content-wise, the new HSBI logo focuses on the new name and, due to the misaligned letters and the three vertical elements, symbolises many conceptual trios that are essential for HSBI, e.g. “teaching, research and transfer,” “Bielefeld, Minden and Gütersloh,” “digitalisation, internationality and sustainability” or “diversity, gender equality and family-friendliness.” “From a design perspective, the new logo is at the core of the new corporate design, which derives a design principle for all media from the misaligned letters and thus strengthens the brand’s recognisability,” said Nina Neusitzer.

“The past and coming months have been and still are all about making the new university name known,” said HSBI’s communicator Lars Kruse. “It was important to us to create a clear and simple corporate design, so that employees would easily be able to use it. After all, in today’s age of social media, almost all university members are publishing content in one way or another.” Since last summer, the Communications Office had been providing employees with several batches of design materials and had organised several information and Q&A sessions to ensure that HSBI would remain functioning under the new name and to “take along” the employees in the change process. Shortly before the big day, employees received an HSBI gift set and they were able to visit a sneak preview of the external poster and social media campaign.

This OWL-wide, moderately designed campaign will focus on the name change in combination with the university’s open day on 6 May. As HSBI’s President Ingeborg Schramm-Wölk concluded, “The ‘Fach’ has gone, the ‘Arts’ were added – apart from that, we will remain the reliable, forward-looking partner for prospective and current students and the many cooperating companies, institutions and networks in the region and beyond.” (lk)