I studied Integrated Design from 2014 to 2019 at KISD — Köln International School of Design in the Faculty of Cultural Studies at TH Köln.
Conceived as integrated, intercultural, and interdisciplinary, the programme complements theory-building and practice-led design processes with experimental and research-based work. In place of a supposedly universal design curriculum, students pursue projects of their own choosing, in which the knowledge and skills each project requires are addressed and developed. The programme thus follows no prescribed canon; the choice of emphasis, the depth of engagement, and the acquisition of skills rest with the students themselves.
My focus initially lay with virtual reality, in its theory as much as in its design practice. In Inner Team in VR I transferred Schulz von Thun’s inner team into a virtual environment; in With Eyes Wide Shut I co-developed a VR application that simulates the viewer’s own real physical surroundings in real time. In the course of my undergraduate studies my interest turned to image-guided teleoperative settings: to constellations, that is, in which action and perception are mediated spatially. Cognitive proximity and spatial distance do not arise there one after the other; they are produced simultaneously by apparatuses of this kind. Early work in this direction includes Sense of Being Here, three phygital room installations that reveal seeing, hearing, and feeling as effects of assemblages, and the research-based teaching project Beyond the Senses on the perception of urban environments, shown during the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale. Both were developed in the field of design theory and research under Prof. Dr. Carolin Höfler, as was the bachelor’s thesis that followed.
I completed the degree with Screen Spaces, an interdisciplinary cooperation with University Hospital Cologne on the interplay of image, space, and action in robot-assisted surgery. The Da Vinci® surgical system gives this constellation concrete form: facing away from the patient, the surgeon works at a control console, so that action and perception are mediated entirely through images.