She was the first woman to hold a professorship at the University of Stuttgart's Department of Systematic Philosophy.
Along with her husband Max Bense, she also taught at the Ulm School of Design and the Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial [pt] in Rio de Janeiro.
[2] She was a significant co-contributor with Max Bense to work on art, design, and semiotics as influenced by information and control systems theory emerging at the time, and documented much of his work in Germany and Brazil.
With Max Bense, she co-authored Wörterbuch der Semiotik (Dictionary of Semiotics) in 1973.
She later published Charles Sanders Peirce Leben und Werk in 1989.