Wismar University of Applied Sciences

Hochschule Wismar carries its three commitments in its subtitle – Technology, Business and Design – and its design tradition reaches back further than the institution itself.

Engineering teaching began in Wismar in 1908 with an Ingenieur-Akademie of thirteen students and two teachers; an Ingenieurhochschule followed in 1969 and a Technische Hochschule in 1988, before the Hochschule Wismar, Fachhochschule für Technik, Wirtschaft und Gestaltung was founded on 1 October 1992. Design came through the Fachschule für angewandte Kunst, founded in 1949 in Heiligendamm, which joined in 1992 and moved into a new campus building in 2000.

On the Baltic coast, the university keeps three faculties, Engineering, Business and Design, and reports 7,315 students in winter semester 2025/26, 1,225 of them international, across 42 bachelor’s, 38 master’s and 41 distance learning programmes, with 423 staff. A second site in Rostock-Warnemünde continues a maritime tradition dating from 1846.

The Faculty of Architecture and Design merged its seven courses into one faculty in 2007 and teaches Architecture, Interior Design, Product Design, Communication Design and Media, Architectural Lighting Design and Jewellery Design. Studio work stands at the centre, backed by one-to-one mentoring; joint projects, the annual DIA exhibition and the DIAlog lectures carry the interdisciplinary idea.