Today user engagement is one of the biggest challenges in user interface design. Marina Gröpel’s bachelor’s project “Gamification als Bildungsprinzip” (“Gamification as a principle of education”) explores the possibilities of a gamificated social network.

With FoodU students of the Merz-Akademie can check out the daily menu of Merz-Cafeteria and DaCapo Restaurant in one simple Android-Application.

Don’t Hassel the WWW is a new project by three brave students of last semester’s project “Timeline”, guided by Olia Lialina. Darja Daut, Susanne Müller and Lisa Hofmann staged the history of David Hasselhoff’s personal webpage.

Christina Xu, co-founder of Awesome Foundation and ROFLcon (Boston) gave a talk in Stuttgart on the 31st of October — “The Power of User Error”

Do You Believe in Users? This question, asked in the legendary 1985 movie Tron, nowadays would have to be asked with a smile, as a nostalgic remark about the days when “apps” in neon costumes competed with each other and their users in racing games — but instead it is gaining earnest relevance.

The Project deals with the remediation of archives, collections and exhibitions. It is a collaboration with the civic Archive „Les Archives“ in Bruxelles.

Denis Hofmann and Thomas Notschka put together detailed tutorial to help you make proper 3D plots with the Makterbot.

In the interactive experience the user is forced to play the role of a spectator who falls through the grim structures of a dysfunctional cyberspace library, barely able to assume control or catch a glimpse at the contents the library hides behind solid bars. The only places he can get some rest are the latrines on each floor.

In February 2012 Joscha Jäger presented his Bachelor’s Project "Open Hypervideo as Archive Interface”. The project uses hypervideo techniques to allow users access to documents from the Archives of the City of Bruxelles (Archives de la Ville de Bruxelles).

Bilum is an interactive installation for an ethnographic museum, which makes it easier for visitors to access the important information about a string bag made by hand in Papua New Guinea, without putting the original object into the shadow.

Endless is a new experimental online narrative by Shirin Sparr. In her work she questions the core principle of the Facebook Timeline — to give its users only one life. Endless considers previous and future lives of its users.

Kristina Spurgat, a student of the Timeline project, finished her In-car Computer Technology Timeline. Six leading automobile industry brands were compared, seven innovations examined. A beautiful interactive SVG chart, though it can be a bit depressing for fans of German automobiles.

2012 Julia Böger and Mona Mohr finished their fandom studies with an impressive project – ZOMBASE. It is a mixed-media open-source game concept for Nintendo DS.

A new consumer electronic device was built during the one week Interface Art workshop given by Johannes p. Osterhoff. Duragram is its name.

Jörg Frohnmayer presented the Virtual City Scapes at Hannover Messe. It is an information visualization demonstrator made for the Fraunhofer IAO. The Magazine C’t showed some pictures of the work in an article.

Two recent projects that could make us revise “Computer Power and Human Reason”

If you are into music, adventure and file sharing, you should definitely try http://www.audiochopsuey.com by Oliver Rübener, a new platform to exchange audio files.

Cyberfeminism is back! Saskia Aldinger — professional internet amateur — presented her new project, the photo series Daughter of all Demos.

The New Media Pathway invites to reception of summer semester 2012. Our students will present their works on 18.04.12 from 17:00 – 19:00 in and around the Virtual Reality Lab 2.6.

Daraja Daut’s work in last semester’s Magic Paper group was centered around scrollbars: their invention and acceptance, their metamorphoses through time and operating systems and their gradual disappearance from interfaces in the last couple of years.

Stefan Krappitz, author of Flyer Generator, Save my Job and other useful applications, finished his studies with the essay Troll Culture, A comprehensive Guide.

Next 15 weeks New Media students will be busy with the following three projects
Gamification with Sabiha Ghellal
WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW with Dragan Espenschied
Timeline with prof. Olia Lialina