Abandoned Clocks
Winter Semester 25/26Course introduction. The guiding principle established from day one: Gestaltung ist Haltung: design as attitude and stance, not just craft. Four designer qualities introduced: critical & reflective, creative & hands-on, collaborative & resilient, responsible. The Ulm Model served as a reference point for integrating theory and making. A conversation based on a slide on Gestalter:innen laid out what designers are: stance, opinion, and good taste; broad curiosity about things beyond design; craft skills that, like a jazz musician’s, don’t all need to be used in every session; and a refusal to hide behind objectivity or data. The jazz musician analogy resonated well and came up again in later sessions. A Walk’n’Talk exercise got students moving and talking from the start. Students mentioned it as a highlight in a Like/Learn/Wish feedback. First guest announced: Johannes Kleske, critical futurist, on October 16.
Guest lecture by Johannes Kleske, critical futurist and strategic advisor. Kleske argued that futures are stories we tell to deal with present uncertainties: not predictions, but narratives to inhabit or resist. The key provocation: present futures, not future presents. Find your own futures narrative, or you become part of someone else’s. The Like/Learn/Wish reflection format was introduced here as a recurring feedback structure, used less consistently than intended across the semester (apart from an open feedback board in FigJam). Historical telephone interfaces were used as entry points into long-term thinking about human-machine interaction, specifically Die Telefonistin (“The Telephone Operator”) as an image of how mediated communication was once embodied and social. The Go Home Go Deep homework format was introduced: short, open-ended prompts to take the course material out of the classroom.
Guest lecture by Katharina Köth, Strategy and Experience Director at Creative Complexity. Her provocation: Caring is Resisting. No design is neutral: a designer who claims to simply do the job well is still making choices, and owning those choices is where responsibility begins. Student results from the previous homework were reviewed together. A hands-on research activity offered two modes: “Gentle Stalking” (desk research into online discourse) or a Mini Interview guided by three questions: “What caught your attention?”, “Why does that matter?”, “What are you still uncertain about?” The topic was gender bias in voice interfaces, a concrete case study in Köth’s argument that design choices are never neutral.
The Diary Study was introduced as a research methodology: students were asked to document their own clock-checking habits, alarm interactions, and encounters with time displayed visually in everyday environments. Results were presented and discussed in the group. Recurring patterns: the idle or abandoned state of household devices (a clock left wrong because unused); “oversleep anxiety” and the proliferation of alarms as a coping strategy, including apps that refuse to stop ringing until the user is fully awake; the surprisingly high frequency of unconscious clock-checking; social dynamics around shared alarm routines, experienced as either morning ritual or friction; and visual clocks being everywhere while a felt sense of time was missing, described as clock illiteracy. The central framing that crystallized from the discussion: time is invisible infrastructure, and making it visible is a design act.
Interview Guardrails were introduced and immediately put to use: students interviewed each other about their diary study observations, digging deeper into the material they had collected rather than going into the field. The five-phase design process (Gestaltungsprozess) was laid out as the structural spine of the semester: Understanding & Researching / Defining & Conceiving / Designing & Prototyping / Testing & Improving / Reflecting & Presenting. A detour into the history of the telephone keypad (how Bell Labs tested layout variants to minimize dialing errors) illustrated that even the most taken-for-granted interfaces are the result of deliberate, researchable choices. The sonic difference between rotary and touch-tone dialing was noted as a case where a technical change also changed the interaction quality.
Michael Schieben ran a hands-on Product Field session with the group, working through the framework in practice. A lemonade stand served as the warm-up topic: low stakes, immediately legible, good for learning the structure of the field before bringing in anything personal. Students then applied the framework to topics of their own, and the conversations quickly moved into more substantive territory. One group worked through screen time and dependency, arriving at speculative “What if” questions about detection, friction, and shared limits. The Product Field Reference Guide was referenced in later sessions and made available in the IxD Lab.
The pivot session. The Abandoned Clock was introduced as the central brief and design object for the remainder of the semester: digital clocks around the home frozen on the wrong time, stuck in idle, abandoned. The concept reframed the everyday failure of ambient devices not as negligence but as a design problem. Examples multiplied: the red indicator light on a Mr. Fill smart compacting bin glowing the wrong color, a Samsung TV stuck on an error screen, S-Bahn passenger displays showing outdated departure information. The recurring “I see UX issues everywhere” meme gave students language to turn this kind of observation into a design practice.
Dunne & Raby’s Design Noir: The Secret Life of Electronic Objects was assigned as the key critical design reference. Final deliverables were announced: one poster, one essay, one social post. Physical hardware was shown for the first time: a bar display unit connected via HDMI and a 3D-printed display enclosure. The venue space at Alte Schule St. Pauli was shown as the final exhibition context.
Go Home Go Deep: explore alternatives to the abandoned clock by looking at the default or idle state of devices in your household.
The process shifted decisively into making. Design process Phase 3 (Designing & Prototyping) was now highlighted. Guest workshop began: Sargol Hedayati, a master student doing an “Incollege”, led Part I of a three-session workshop on Design Systems and Prototyping with Figma.
Two course-wide principles were stated plainly: “Make it your own. No recipes.” and “Process as becoming. Feedback loops.” Both pushed back on the idea that design is about following a method to a predetermined outcome. The full hardware kit was laid out for students: Raspberry Pi 4 and associated sensors, OLED and e-paper displays, and a bar display unit.
Sargol Hedayati, Part II of the Figma workshop. The Product Field Reference Guide was placed in the IxD Lab next to the printer, available for students to pick up. McLuhan’s Understanding Media anchored a discussion of how media shapes the humans who use it: “We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.” The history of UI elements and physical button conventions was examined. A 1991 HCIL touchscreen toggle interface was shown as an early example of designing digital controls for ambient use. A reading recommendation: “Stop Training Students to Compete with Machines.”
Sargol Hedayati, Part III (final Figma session). The Squiggle (Damien Newman’s Process of Uncertainty diagram) was introduced to legitimize the messy, non-linear reality of design process: from noise and uncertainty through emergent patterns and insights toward clarity and focus. A visual from weave magazine titled “Idee im Korsett” (idea in a corset) reinforced the creative tension between intuition and structure. A LinkedIn post about designers needing each other brought the conversation toward collaborative practice and peer feedback as part of process.
Pre-holiday session. Bertram’s guest lecture date updated to January 8. The Product Field Field Guide was offered free in exchange for a five-star review, valid until December 24. For the remaining semester, Phases 3, 4, and 5 of the design process were circled together and labeled “REST OF THE SEMESTER,” giving students a clear signal that the work was now about making, testing, and presenting rather than researching. The deliverable framing shifted slightly: the essay became an article.
Return from winter break, held remotely: a photograph of the Fehmarnbelt Bridge opened the session because that is where the session was being taught from. A bin on a Hamburg street overflowed with trash while the display screen continued to operate: another example of the abandoned clock problem playing out in public space.
Bertram Gugel, Head of Product at ARD, joined as a guest, sharing insights and giving feedback on student ideas and conceptual drafts. The abandoned clock theme resonated with him, and he extended it: not just clocks, but the whole category of smart household devices that end up unused: an Alexa gathering dust, a TV screen dark and silent most of the day. The abandoned device as a broader design problem, not a niche one.
Go Home Go Deep: formulate at least one “What if?” question for your project before the next session on January 22. The speculative question format encouraged students to shift from problem-framing to possibility-opening.
Off-topic on topic readings: “Gen Z Is Cutting Back on Screen Time,” “How to live a more analogue life,” “5 Dinge, um 2026 weniger online zu sein” (“5 Things to Be Less Online in 2026”). These weren’t tangential: they brought current social context into conversation with the course’s central preoccupation: what it means to design ambient, non-demanding relationships between people and technology.
A single case study anchored the session: the analog Twitter wall at re:publica ACT!ON in 2012. Over the course of the conference, 38,378 tweets were printed on A4 sheets and pinned to a physical wall. Visitors walked the length of it searching for their own posts. The piece made the invisible infrastructure of social media tangible, slow, and spatial. Twitter’s own visual identity evolution from 2006 to 2023 was traced alongside it. A Dell World social media listening wall from 2014 provided a corporate counterpart: ambient screens aggregating brand mentions in real time.
Both cases were read through the course’s lens: what happens when digital information moves off the personal screen and into shared space? The Mr. Fill smart bin had become a running character in the course’s recurring ritual: “I see UX issues everywhere” — an open invitation for the group to share design friction spotted in daily life. The instructor had been contributing one recurring example: the bin, observed and documented across several sessions on the commute to Hildesheim. This session the bin showed green light, though what exactly that meant remained unclear. A letter to the company maintaining the bins had been sent. No reply yet.
Final session before the presentation period. Voice (speech input and output, verbal commands, conversation as interface) was given dedicated focus as a modality that had run through the course’s interest in interaction beyond screen and touch. Apps for voice-to-text and ambient voice capture (Wispr Flow, Monologue, handy) were shown. A still from Twin Peaks played in the background as the session image: Agent Dale Cooper, forever dictating observations into his Micro-Mac tape recorder, addressed to his unseen secretary Diane. Ambient voice capture as a way of being in the world, decades before anyone called it that.
The assessment was framed as explicitly personal: “The reflection and review at the end of the semester is personal. The assessment considers the expression of personal stance, critical engagement, and development with the same weight as designed artifacts (e.g. prototypes).” This closed the loop opened in the first session with Gestaltung ist Haltung: the work was always partly about who the designer is becoming, not only what they make.
Off-topic on topic: “No to NoUI,” “Designers as Intent Orchestrators,” “Skills, Tools and MCPs — What’s The Difference?” Final presentation: Wednesday 25 February 2026, 15:00–18:00, Alte Schule St. Pauli, Seilerstrasse 41–43, Hamburg.