Build a Bird is an interactive installation, which aims for a creative learning process on the phenomenon of nonvocal bird sounds.

Being presented with a collection of about fifteen detachable bird parts that all make their distinctive sound, the visitors are given the freedom to assemble their individual bird. Heads, wings, feet, and tails are all equipped with different electrical resistors. Hidden inside the bird's body is a microcontroller, which identifies what parts are connected. Once attached, each piece unlocks information about its own characteristics and plays its signature sound. The visitors can now hear the beats and rhythms that their very own creation would be contributing to nature’s soundscape.

This one might strike you as a little weird. But what’s the point of experience design, if not sometimes trying to make your way into people's heads?

The Stromboli Cult was a project in two chapters: It all started on the mystical volcanic island Stromboli in the Tyrrhenian Sea. During one week, we rented a beautiful white villa a few minutes uphill from the village. It was there that I designed an experience that was meant to recreate becoming a member of a cult.

Deep diving into research about the mysterious past of the island and the infamous cults of the 60ies and 70ies, I recreated their methods and combined them to form an inauguration ritual during sunrise in a hidden bay. I collected insight into how a carefully designed and completely analog experience, could – even with the participants knowing most of the intention – trigger very similar reactions as the ones reported by actual cult members; such as an intense sense of belonging, tightening the bond between the members in a “beautiful superabundance of love" to such an extent that it would sometimes just barely tilt into repugnance of anyone who chose not to be part of the rituals and the cult.

The second, more digital and much darker part of the experience took place back in Zurich. In a closed space, every participant (one by one) would get a VR headset used like a blindfold, where I could control if and what they saw. Through a combination of video, audio, and human touch I would build up their trust in me (again playing the role of the cult leader) and with it their confidence in walking around the space blindly, but guided. Once they were confident enough, the experience would come to an end with an uncomfortable combination of audio and video showing the cult leader disappear, thus breaking their trust and leaving them on their own, at the exact moment when they were stepping off the edge of a platform into emptiness. Not high enough for them to be injured, but just high enough to hit them with the feeling one experiences when expecting the end of a staircase one step before it actually ends.

The Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration explores the antarctic expeditions and with them the race of the first people getting to the south pole.

Including Information about every single ship and its captain, the data visualisation tells the story of these curagious, sometimes downright insane men and the struggle with death they faced during their ventures in a scrollmagic-powered one-pager.

Grundlos was a micro brewery based in Winterthur. They needed a simple but playful website representing their lager and brown ale.

Since they had no money whatsoever I accepted payment in beer. Most of which I never came around to drink before it went bad, because of it’s bottle-fermented nature. But hey, it was fun.

The Room is our take on modern automation and the price it sometimes comes at.

Four hypothetical prototypes; a fridge, a nutrition tracking pill, a decision helper and a smart lock. Each of them containing four levels of automation. The first one is basic, and might as well already exist, then with each level, it gains functionality but at the same time takes more control from its users.

The four prototypes were then arranged into an exhibition. For a full immersion experience, the installation itself is automated: the visitors could only view one part at a time and were guided through the exhibition by light beams and audio signals.

As they went from one prototype to the next, they could find out for themselves at what level they’d draw the line, where their personal boundaries lie between being supported by technology and being controlled by it.

In order to deepen the story, each prototype is accompanied by an interview of one of its fictional users and the way they justify, for themselves, their decision to use the machine at its highest level of automation.

Peacock is an experimental embodied interaction prototype.

Strutting around with his feathers all puffed up. Displaying his beautifully coloured plumage. The male peacock tries to impress the hens. On a visual level this process is quite elaborate but unlike the peacocks complex tail feathers might suggest there is a simplicity to the animals courtship ritual. A simplicity which is seemingly lost in modern human dating and relationships. We over intellectualise our relationships and make connections between us and our partners all about mutual agreements, interests and jobs whilst often wondering why our relationships fail after a while. The core concept of our work is to explore this instinctive, bodily aspect further by enhancing it through the produced wearable. With the attached sensors we measure the bodies signs of excitement, such as sweaty hands or a heightened heart rate, to determine how much our suits are going to show signs of instinctive interest. (Text by Carlo Natter)

The Society of the Frozen Hour is an invitation to rethink the way we consider time in our everyday routine.

For my BA project I created a Dialogflow-powered chatbot called “Momo” which ran on the messaging platform Telegram. Momo’s purpose other than creating your personal clock and explaning the idea and the core values was to guide and support you throughout the experience. She would get you to reflect on your use of time and the frozen hour and push you to rethink how you assert value to activities.

At the core of the experience was your personal clock. Making use of the subjectivity of time it ran just a little bit faster than the standard clock. A difference so small you’d never realise it without comparing the two, but big enough to enable it to freeze for one hour every day at a time of your preference. Thus enabling your very own frozen hour.

During the development of these tools, I repeatedly tested them on a group of people to iterate on momo’s character and tactics and found that the confrontation with their own evaluation of time and the possibility to open up on other activities and non-activities influences the participants daily routine even after they stoped living on the alternative clock.

Spore and Midnight in Bangkok were a set of installations by our artists collective «Nachtschicht». Featured in the 2017 Zauberwald at Lenzerheide, the installations used a combination of Polymer-Optical- Wires and high-power LEDs to create a huge monster-like sculpture.

The material choices gave it the ability to vanish in the dark of the night and then suddenly reappear in different mythical shapes.

It had to survive very harsh weather for two weeks. During that time it was visited by thousands.

Olymp is a relatively simple but versatile bracketing tool.

Back in 2017, we used to meet up for a few rounds of table tennis every week and we did not find any good tool that did specifically what we wanted it to do. So for our tournaments, but also as an exercise in screen design and web technologies, we created our own.

The Escher Walk is a tour trough the city of Zurich, following the life and work of the swiss pioneer Alfred Escher.

We designed the winning concept for the tour guide application which went on to be developed by Lucid and Sternenbauer.

Credits for the visuals mainly go to Manuel Leuthold.

Reflector (WT) is a web application written in React.

As a bouldering compagnion, it is meant to suggest parkours trough a sentence based inteface. It also features livesearch for all the boulder problems, a map on where to find them, and it saves your progress.

It's a bit of a guerilla project, I never really asked the gym if they mind. I just scrape the recent boulder data from their website every few weeks. So pssst.