Sense of Being here. Designing phygital Interactions

2017 / 2 Months / Teaching Assistant / Köln International School of Design

The overlapping of Virtual Reality environments and real-life sensual impressions provides numerous approaches for a blurring of stereotypical dichotomies such as analogue versus digital or material versus immaterial. Sensual perceptions, body movements, and immediate actions can now be easily and unconventionally mixed in specific physical-virtual spaces and activities of action. Thus, a clear distinction between reality and mediality is more difficult to draw and renders formerly concise structures more and more invalid, yet not completely dissolved. For the recipient, it is rather that perceptions and meanings of these real and virtual environments can shift and transform – dependent on how they are individually experienced and attributed to.

The exhibition Sense of Being here in the area of expertise Design Theory and Research deals with these numerous intertwining’s of spatial spheres and sensual perceptions both in theory and practice. Three phygital room installations revealed that the skills and senses of seeing, hearing, feeling are by no means self-evident, but arise out of various textures, contexts, and formats defined by many players in media, technology, culture, and society.