"All of our culture is based on what we know and how we use that knowledge ... and this makes it a basic requirement of research if we want to understand a culture. Or maybe to understand ourselves."

Director Dagmar Schäfer in conversation with Ulrike Timm for Deutschlandfunk Kultur on her path to researching the history of technology and innovation in China, and her plans to use her 2020 Leibniz award to focus upon the influence of material culture on the development of technology in history. What impact, for example, have images of the sky had on the development of astronomical knowledge?