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.