Your microwave is blinking 00:00. Your thermostat is still on last year’s schedule. The smart speaker has not been touched in months. These objects are everywhere, and their failure is a design problem that went unconsidered: the abandoned state, the default, the idle, the state in which most devices spend most of their lives.

This is what we spent a semester with. Not the screen you carry everywhere you go. Instead: rooms rather than pockets. Technology woven into the environment rather than held in the hand. Devices that earn their place in a shared space without demanding attention.

Guided by one conviction: Gestaltung ist Haltung. Design is stance before it is skill. That is where the semester started. And where the student projects landed.

In the latest iteration of this interaction design course, students were asked to look past the dominant model of human-machine relationships: the personal device as prosthetic, the smartphone as an extension of the self, the cyborg logic of individual augmentation. Instead, the course moved into a different territory: rooms rather than pockets, shared space rather than private screens, technology woven into the environment rather than held in the hand.¹

The subject was ambient devices: objects that display information, respond to presence, track context, and make decisions without demanding attention. The material was multimodal interaction: voice, presence, context rather than just screen and touch. Hyper-situational and adaptive rather than deterministic. The question running under everything: what does it mean to design something that works even when nobody is watching?

The course opened with a provocation drawn from design theory: Gestaltung ist Haltung. Design is not primarily a set of skills or methods but an attitude, a stance toward the world and toward the people you design for. This grounded the semester in critical engagement from the start. Four designer qualities were held up as guides: critical and reflective, creative and hands-on, collaborative and resilient, responsible. These were not aspirational labels but working conditions.

Guest lecturers brought the outside in. Johannes Kleske, critical futurist and strategic advisor, argued that futures are stories we tell to deal with present uncertainties: not predictions, but narratives to inhabit or resist. His key provocation: present futures, not future presents. Find your own futures narrative, or you become part of someone else’s. Katharina Köth, Strategy and Experience Director at Creative Complexity, arrived with a provocation: Caring is Resisting. No design is neutral, she argued. A designer who claims to simply do the job well is still making choices, and owning those choices is where responsibility begins. Michael Schieben introduced The Product Field, a framework for thinking about value and use in context.

The course was structured around research before making. Students ran diary studies, documenting how they and others encountered time displayed in urban and domestic environments: clocks, displays, alarms, departure boards, status indicators. Interviews and field observation followed. From this material, a theoretical and aesthetic position was built before any prototype was started.

The central design object emerged midway through the semester: The Abandoned Clock. A household clock still on summer time. A microwave blinking 00:00 since the last power cut. A thermostat stuck on a schedule nobody set. These objects are everywhere, and their failure is not accidental. The need for dedicated time display has been largely displaced by the phone in every pocket. Yet these objects remain, stuck in rooms, still blinking. That is a failure of design, not of negligence: the abandoned state was simply never carefully considered. These objects were never given a designed behavior for their abandoned state: what a device does, or shows, or says, when nobody is actively using it. The idle state, the default state, the state in which most ambient devices spend most of their lives, had been left unconsidered.

Bertram Gugel, Head of Product at ARD, joined later in the semester to share insights and give feedback on student ideas and conceptual drafts. The abandoned clock theme resonated with him: he extended it to 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.

Students were asked to explore alternatives. The hardware made available for prototyping was chosen deliberately: Raspberry Pi boards and displays of various types and form factors. These are not consumer products. They require decisions. They force the designer to think about what information is shown, in what form, at what moment, for whom.

Low-fidelity prototyping with cardboard appliance forms with a smartphone as the screen sat alongside the hardware, keeping the emphasis on interaction concept over technical execution.

The semester oscillated between two orientations that Dunne & Raby describe well in Design Noir: The Secret Life of Electronic Objects²: the problem-solving mindset that asks how to make things work better, and the speculative mindset that asks whether the problem was correctly named in the first place. The most interesting work refuses to choose.

A session on ambient information display at re:publica 2012 made this concrete:³ thousands of tweets printed on paper and pinned to a physical wall, visitors walking along it looking for themselves. Social infrastructure made spatial, slow, shared. The course asked students to think in this register: not about adding a feature to a device but about what kind of relationship between a person and an object a design proposes, and whether that relationship is worth proposing.

What role can AI play in all of this? Not as a black box that produces answers but as a material to think with and a subject to interrogate. The course used AI tools in the design process, and also treated AI-driven ambient systems as objects of critical study. Making AI legible, making its logic discussable, making its presence in a room something other than invisible infrastructure absorbed without understanding: this too is an interaction design problem.

The student projects that follow are responses to these questions. They are posters, articles, and social posts. They are also arguments about what ambient devices could be.

Students are assessed on finished artifacts and on development in equal measure: how clearly they express a personal stance, how critically they engage with the material, how far their thinking has moved. The work on display here is both outcome and evidence of a process.

Christophe Stoll, February 2026