The design activity is always accompanied by ways of speaking that either justify what is to be made or reflect on what has been made. The discussion of forms plays an important role in this. The challenge of the binational research project 2007-2009 was to develop suitable terms for this. Students and teachers from the ZHdK (Department of Design, specializing in Industrial Design) and the Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design Halle (idea Institute) collected terms from different professional and knowledge fields and compiled a catalog of selected basic terms to describe product forms. Using specific objects from the Museum für Gestaltung's design collection, the collected form terms were tested and evaluated with experts from different design fields.

Design students from both institutions further developed the findings from the research work and published their findings in the Formfächer. The handy picture dictionary for the description of product shapes illustrates a selection of terms using 100 annotated objects from the design collection of the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich.