Describing plants and exploring their appearance, occurrence and usefulness have been common practice from antiquity. Even though the term “herbarium” underwent various changes in meaning over the centuries, it generally referred to a book on herbs, listing plants that were believed to possess pharmaceutical properties. Illustrations – some of them of high artistic quality – in books on herbs have been known since the Early Modern Period. Illustrative woodcuts created between 1530 and 1546, depicting the herbaria of the three pioneers of botany, Otto Brunfels, Leonhart Fuchs and Hieronymus Bock, had additional value as botanical reference points (Dressendörfer 2011). Nature printing, using the plant itself as the printing plate, was another method used in illustrating botanical books. It drew on the idea of nature inscribing itself to determine the technique of illustration. The rather elaborate procedure, described by Leonardo da Vinci and perfected during the 19th century, allowed for a detailed image of the plant in question.

Exhibits collected by the Duke of Weissenfels provided the basic stock for a larger collection of the Collegium Medico-Chirurgicum in Dresden. This was the first Saxon school of surgery, opening in 1748. It was succeeded by the Provisional Teaching Institute of Medicine and Surgery (1814/15) and the Surgical-Medical Academy (1815 to 1864). These institutions also made use of comprehensive collections in their training of military doctors, surgeons and medical practitioners. Unfortunately, none of these exhibits made it into the possession of the indirect successor institution, the Medical Academy “Carl Gustav Carus”, founded 90 years after the Surgical-Medical Academy closed. However, a physician interested in medical history began acquiring new objects for teaching purposes. Heinrich Fritz, head of the X-ray and Radium Institute of the Dresden-Johannstadt Hospital from 1948, then Professor of Radiology and Radiotherapeutics at the Medical Academy “Carl Gustav Carus” and Director of the Radiology Clinic, collected more than 20 different X-ray tubes, documenting the development of the relatively new discipline. They were on display in a purpose-built cabinet and were used in the training of medical students and medical technical assistants. Nevertheless, there seem to have been no systematic efforts at the new institution to collect material witnesses to medical history, despite the efforts of Heinz Egon Kleine-Natrop, a proven expert and promoter of Dresden’s medical history at the Medical Academy “Carl Gustav Carus”. Kleine-Natrop was the first Director of the Dermatological Clinic and full Professor of Dermatology from 1957. This lack of system when it came to acquiring historical exhibits was perhaps due to the proximity of two important institutions, both of which had been founded before World War I and already owned extensive medical history collections: the Karl Sudhoff Institute for the History of Medicine and the Natural Sciences in Leipzig and the “Deutsches Hygiene-Museum” in Dresden.

For thousands of years, coloring agents have been employed to dye textiles and other materials. Apart from the time-honored use of colors in many fields of design, research into colors has increased considerably as regards function and importance, particularly in recent years. The material witnesses associated with these processes have also found their way into the Dye Collection of the TUD Dresden University of Technology, one of the most comprehensive and significant collections of its kind in Europe. The inventory currently includes around 1,500 natural dyes of plant or animal origin, more than 20,000 synthetic dye samples and over 3,000 sample cards and books, as well as numerous samples of dyes prepared in the Institute of Colour Chemistry, the domicile of the Dye Collection. It also contains coal and tar products, various fiber materials, earth and mineral colors, and a collection of the Institute’s scientific papers and specimens from 1897 onwards. The Collection documents the development of color chemistry and the dye industry from the mid-19th century onwards and is still used today as a source of visual aids and as a reference work in teaching and for scientific purposes.

When scientists today talk of a mathematical model, they usually do not refer to objects such as those presented in this Collection, but to a formalized description − employing mathematical means − of a sub-problem from the world we experience. The more precisely an event is “modeled,” the better it can be predicted. Accurate weather forecasts, analyses of financial markets and the characterization of complicated processes from physics, chemistry and biology become possible when the power of computers is harnessed. Despite these obvious successes in almost all areas of life, despite their key role in advanced technology, and despite many attempts at mediation, mathematicians and the rest of society remain thoroughly divided: Their formalistic science is often regarded as incomprehensible and remote, not least because of its highly condensed language.

Universities have been setting up collections for teaching and research purposes since the 16th century. Cartographic collections deserving this name, however, only came into being during the 19th century, due to the development of geography (in German often referred to as “Erdkunde”) and geodesy. The late emergence of cartography as a science also had a delaying effect. Early attempts in collecting were, for example made, at the University of Wittenberg, founded in 1502. Here, Phillip Melanchthon had a store of wall maps he used in teaching (Stams 1985).

The traditional division of electrical engineering into strong and weak current engineering is no longer common today, following a pronounced differentiation in the discipline. For historical purposes, however, the collections need to be traced back to the way they originated so that they can be categorized. This explains why two collections − housed, significantly, in the archetypal home of weak current technology, the Barkhausen Building − are presently exhibited according to their original connection to the subjects of weak current technology and precision engineering. These are the Acoustic-Phonetic Collection and the “elektron” Collections. The latter most closely reflects the divergent paths taken during the development of weak-current technology and precision engineering. As a consequence, it was created from different historical sources and its structure is that of a teaching collection containing museum objects.

Machines that can talk and listen have been part of historical tradition since antiquity. Dresden also boasts one of the legendary “speaking heads”, which is said to have been made around 1700 by the versatile vice-rector of the “Kreuzschule”, Johann Valentin Merbitz. However, it was not until the Age of Enlightenment, under the influence of Leonhard Euler, that serious scientific attempts were made to build “speaking machines”. One of these, constructed by Wolfgang von Kempelen and described in 1791, has rightly become famous. Its creator presented it on one of his lecture tours in Dresden in 1784, and today a replica from 2009 enhances the Acoustic-Phonetic Collection of the TUD Dresden University of Technology. It was a long road, then, to the establishment of the field that is referred to today as natural language human-machine interaction or more simply as speech. Its development would not have been possible at all without the accompanying preliminary work in electronics and computer technology. At universities, the field was institutionalized in different ways, with its interdisciplinary nature rooted in very different disciplines, such as phonetics, physiology, perceptual psychology, acoustics, communications engineering, and computer science. In Dresden, speech technology emerged as part of weak current engineering. At present, this field is called information technology and has its own collection: the “elektron” Collection.

There is barely any other aspect of our lives and our knowledge that has the topicality and complexity of color, reflected and refracted in all fields of scholarship as it is. It is due to these properties that color has long since ceased to be the subject of only one academic discipline, as was the case regarding philosophy centuries ago. Just as light and color are connected to all areas of life, nature, technology, science, art, culture and education, recent analysis shows that the path of color theory initially led through the most differentiated investigations in many individual disciplines. It then continued on towards an increasingly multidisciplinary field of knowledge that has become almost boundless (Welsch/Liebmann 2003; Kuehni/Schwarz 2007).

Industrial design at TUD Dresden University of Technology prioritizes human needs and experiencing in designing complex novel systems for desirable futures. For this purpose, it integrates human-centred design, engineering and social sciences, with a tradition going back to the 1950s. The Industrial Design Collection is comparatively young. It is also a relatively small and unprocessed collection. Nevertheless, it is of relevance for research into the history of design, product development and material culture in the GDR. Parts of the estate of Rudi Högner form the cornerstone of the Collection. Högner was the founder of design at TUD and had a particular influence on design in the GDR. In addition, there are objects from conceptual and development projects of the 1970s and 1980s undertaken by the Industrial Design Working Group at TUD in collaboration with industry. These objects provide an insight into the processes of design in the GDR. Design in Eastern Europe and especially in the GDR has attracted increased attention in academic research in terms of its history, its approaches and solutions. TUD’s Industrial Design Collection provides a piece of the puzzle concerned with researching design in the GDR, together with extensive inventories in the Federal Archives and at the “Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland” in Berlin, and at the Horst Michel Archive of the Bauhaus University in Weimar, which has been processed in recent years. Other inventories are held at the archives and academic heritage offices of Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design Halle, at the Weißensee Academy of Art in Berlin, and also at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts (HfBK). 25 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, interest in the subject had become visible in various ways. In 2014, Karl Clauss Dietel was the first designer from East Germany to receive the Federal Award for Design for his life’s work. Likewise, in 2014, the biography of Martin Kelm, the long-time head of the GDR’s Office of Industrial Design, was published in a collaborative project at TUD. Inventories from the Industrial Design Collection were also used for this publication (Wölfel et al. 2014). Similarily, inventories from the Collection have been used for the touring exhibition on German Design 1949—1989 by the Saxon State Collections and the Vitra Design Museum. Additions from 1990 onwards complement the inventory from the GDR. The Collection includes a total of well over 100 objects from the field of aesthetic design fundamentals, more than 50 design models of products, machines, vehicles, airplanes and other items, some prototypes and series products as well as numerous documents, drawings, photographs, and slides, most of which were created at TUD or are related to the activities of designers at TUD.

There would be no University art without a campus and the institute buildings. Incorporated in the Office for Academic Heritage, Scientific and Art Collections (OAH) since 2003, the extensive Art Collections of the TUD Dresden University of Technology span many genres and date back to the founding of the Technical School in 1828. They are closely connected to building activities and campus planning, that is to the University buildings at changing locations over two centuries. The majority of these buildings are listed as individual monuments and are under the special protection of the Free State of Saxony.