From 2019 to 2022 I devoted my consecutive master’s studies in Integrated Design at KISD — Köln International School of Design at TH Köln — to a search for sites where physical-material spatial configurations are overlaid by virtual structures and platforms.
That search grew out of my undergraduate studies, in the course of which my interest had turned to image-guided teleoperative settings: to constellations, that is, in which action and perception are mediated spatially, and which are not confined to the operating room. On the theoretical level, the question was which perceptual and operational modalities such virtuo-material constellations bring about, and what it feels like to be, and to act, within them.
I pursued that question in the research proposal Immersive Fields, the theoretical part of my master’s thesis: reality and virtuality figure there not as an opposing pair but as points braced against each other within one bodily-material field. Such a field forms wherever the limits of bodily perception are exceeded, materially or through an apparatus — in a first-person shooter as much as on an underground railway or in a minimally invasive robot-assisted operation.
The final thesis, City on Demand, carries the question of perception and action in such fields over into the city and analyses the algorithmic transformation of urban space through platform economies. Using mapping techniques and (photo-)graphic analyses, I examined how on-demand service companies appropriate urban space physically and virtually alike and make it an integral part of their own corporate infrastructure.
The thesis was written in the context of the Echtzeitstadt research unit, supervised by Prof. Dr. Carolin Höfler and Prof. Dr. Lasse Scherffig in design theory and research as well as interaction design. Method and subject matter took shape together over these years: design-ethnographic fieldwork, mapping, and graphic analysis as procedures for making visible infrastructures designed not to be seen.