MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Pauline Saglio
Folklore Fusion – a CGI character project developed by students in Bachelor Media & Interaction Design at ECAL, exploring the creative collision between Japanese and Swiss folklore through the lens of contemporary visual storytelling.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Sébastien Matos
A collection of interface buttons designed and animated by first-year students of the Bachelor’s program in Media & Interaction Design. Each element includes a standard animation, an exaggerated animation, and an unexpected version.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
by Julie Turin
Assembly line work and online orders have become the norm, even in craftsmanship. The Star's Bags app is a seamstress's response to this trend, offering an immersive shopping experience to highlight manual labor before the customer receives their bag. "The Tree Bag" is the first collection from this app, which can expand into other themes. Through this experience, the customer participates in every step of the bag's creation over several days: gathering materials, placing patterns, cutting, sewing, pinning, addressing, and shipping. By following this process, the customer appreciates the effort involved and retains a special memory of their purchase, enhancing the value of the product received.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
by Viktor Gagné
The weight of materials produced by humans is now believed to exceed that of all terrestrial biomass. How will these artifacts integrate into the rest of the environment in a million years? Serialized Saplings is an interactive installation that speculates on a potential form of vegetation to come, heavily altered by the excesses of human production, here crystallized through the symbol of the electrical outlet. By manipulating the connections of several power strips, the participant is invited to program the "genetic code" of hybrid plant species that do not yet exist and whose appearance resembles our industrial standards. This generated vegetation is then classified in the form of a digital herbarium that can be consulted and studied.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
by Sasha Iatsenia
Today, 1 in 15 children are affected by a disorder that alters their behaviors, impacting their educational, socialization, and communication skills. LittleCubes were designed as therapeutic toys to help develop these skills through light and play. Using a cube that lights up and responds to natural gestures, therapists can create fun and engaging exercises using an intuitive app. While designing this project, I discovered that I have autistic traits, inspiring me to build a toy I would have loved as a child. My goal is to build bridges between neurotypical and neurodiverse experiences, making the world more inclusive for all. To date, I have tested the cube with more than 15 therapists and 30 children (ASD, motor deficiencies and associated disorders). I hope to continue this project after my diploma. This project is supported by Fondation Dr Combe.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
by Marius Parisod
At the crossroads between video games and board games, Get-Out 4 is an invitation to rediscover the joy of playing together. This puzzle game, designed to be played by two or more players, encourages direct interaction and cooperation. The use of external game pieces invites players to rely on their observation and deduction skills, bringing them together in a shared experience that goes beyond screens. The design of Get-Out 4 is based on a minimalist aesthetic inspired by early video games such as Pong, Pac-Man, and Tetris. This visual simplicity not only evokes nostalgia but is strategically employed to enhance player engagement by focusing on gameplay mechanics. This project, beyond its playful aspect, offers human interaction through the lens of gaming.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet
REMIND ME I'M ALIVE is a companion that combines the functions of a fidget toy with those of a personal reminder. The gadget uses information on Wifi connections in its immediate vicinity to better understand the user's environment. By examining these connections - the only gateway to the outside world - the gadget can tell whether the user is in a busy or quiet environment, and even give indications of possible stressful situations. When the user is not interacting with the device, it constantly monitors his or her status via the surrounding wifi connections. These connections provide implicit information on social conditions, working environments, infrastructures and much more. If the user does not communicate with the companion for more than six hours, it “dies” and must be resuscitated. This feature underlines the need for regular interaction and ensures that the companion is always ready for use.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
by Thomas Gaudin, Olivia Capol, Livia Schmid, Emilie Maier
This project revolves around a fully functional data visualization experience and graphical interface, designed and programmed by second-year Bachelor students in Media & Interaction Design as part of a course taught by Gaël Hugo. This exercise begins with the following reflection: "Fun" datasets concern topics that are of personal interest, and can be used to answer unexpected questions and explore relationships that aren’t immediately intuitive. Perhaps you start with a question or hypothesis, and then find a dataset to prove (or disprove) your theory. Or, you might even generate your own dataset using web scraping techniques or an open API. In fact, creating your own dataset enables you to collect, label, and prepare a clean dataset. - Kindra Coope
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Matthieu Minguet
Agents Are All You Need is the result of a one-week workshop dedicated to exploring Autonomous Agents and their potential in innovative scenarios. By repurposing existing platforms, students leveraged the reasoning capabilities of multimodal language models to automate complex actions rather than limiting themselves to generating text or images.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Vera van de Seyp
How does our physical body interact with digital content ? The students have explored creative ways in which typography and graphics can be manipulated in response to human movement.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet
Fictional mobile apps based on the "Much Faster / Much Slower" theme, offering new ways of consulting, communicating, creating, playing, discovering and learning. Students in their 2nd year of Bachelor Media & Interaction Design designed a dedicated experience and graphic interface via interactive prototypes on Figma.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
by Elina Crespi
Metamorphoses is a video game installation that lets you develop your world by exploring its different dimensions. It is an organic machine that represents a harmony of opposites, a duality between machine and human. There is a balance to be found: should the machine adapt to the human or the human to the machine? Human to human? Machine to machine? By participating in Metamorphoses, players are invited to create connections by plugging in a jack cable to solve enigmas. They actively engage in the narrative and interact with the environment. The organic machine embodies a duality by making natural and technological elements coexist in an interactive and changing environment, thereby prompting introspection about our own world.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
by Lily Rose Hold
Dotto is a digital puzzle game that draws inspiration from classic dot-to-dot games. It combines connecting dots with the satisfaction of creating vector graphics. As you navigate through the collection of puzzles, you embark on a journey of discovery. Each connected dot unveils a part of the underlying artwork, gradually bringing it to life with every connection. A blend of satisfying gameplay and the celebration of vector Illustration, Dotto offers an experience for puzzle enthusiasts and those who love graphic illustration alike.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
by Tickie Bindner
Sazen City immerses us into the collective landscape of our memories. Each participant takes part in the experience by exploring a territory, then sending digital postcards that generate a dynamic and imaginary map. Unlike photos of panoramas or cities, these digital cards depict memories, universal moments and emotions, revealing a new form of epistolary exchange that is more suited to our digital spaces. Inspired by Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Sazen City employs machine learning to co-create a collective space. As it evolves, this shared landscape questions the individuality of our memories and the role of artificial imagination in our digital environments.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
by Niki Zaal
Waazo is a mobile game that connects unknown participants for a social and friendly experience. It is an experience where virtual reality and reality come together. Today, smartphones and social networks connect us with people far away, but they can also separate us from our physical surroundings. This interactive game uses this hyper-connectivity to reconnect people in a specific location, paradoxically. The game draws inspiration from our childhood games, such as Where’s Waldo? or Cluedo. Using their phone, each participant explores the people around them to discover unknown individuals. Subtle clues like their posture, mood or main accessory will guide the player in this quest for encounters.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Angelo Benedetto
Dynamic identity for the fictional artistic ceramics festival ARC (Artistic Revolution of Ceramics) proposed by Livia Schmid as part of the Dynamic Display course led by Angelo Benedetto.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Angelo Benedetto
Dynamic identity for the fictional indie film festival HIFF (Haze Indie Film Festival) proposed by Valère Zen-Ruffinen as part of the Dynamic Display course led by Angelo Benedetto
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Angelo Benedetto
Dynamic identity for the fictional electronic music festival UFOS (Underground From Outter Space) proposed by Baptiste Godart as part of the Dynamic Display course led by Angelo Benedetto.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Angelo Benedetto
Dynamic identity for the fictional upcycling festival R&R (Rebuild & Revive) proposed by Emilie Maier as part of the Dynamic Display course led by Angelo Benedetto.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Harry Bloch
Websites developed during a semester according to a recipe chosen by the students in the course of Screen Design of Harry Bloch, second year Bachelor Visual Communication.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet, Yehwan Song
Second year Interaction Design students developped a messaging app centered around the theme of “Much Faster / Much Slower”. The goal is to create a unique mobile messaging app that offers a distinctive experience compared to existing instant messaging apps. The project explores the impact of technology on our relationship with speed and communication. It focuses on how advancements in technologies have shaped our experiences and preferences for speed. The project also looks at the role of instant messaging apps in changing the way we communicate and interact, taking up a significant amount of our daily engagement time. The goal is to translate this fascination with speed and slowness into innovative interaction design concepts related to communication.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Yehwan Song
“During the workshop we’ve invented a new web-interaction with the hand and body gesture. The unique gestures found in our daily habits have been combined with mobile touch screen, gyro sensor, web camera and microphones and created new narration in the websites on the screen. As we use specific gestures to express certain feelings, we need to create more sophisticated and diverse user web-interaction. This workshop was the first step of inventing and exploring diverse user interaction and sophisticated web-narration.” Yehwan Song
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet, Christophe Guignard, Gaël Hugo, Laura Nieder, Pauline Saglio
Today, for many, the memories that remain are only those of images taken with digital cameras. Through this continuous storage process, we offload those moments by trusting instantaneous backups. MEMOGRAM challenges this delegation by offering a time capsule in the form of tickets, accompanying our memories with textual clues and descriptions. www.memogram.ch
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet, Christophe Guignard, Gaël Hugo, Laura Nieder, Pauline Saglio
How can artists/designers share and enrich their practice in a context where videoconferencing is becoming one of the most used means of disseminating content? In the form of a mini web-conference, Public Lectures consists of a succinct presentation of the work of people active in the field of culture through audiovisual content. Encouraging interaction, through comments and content exchange, Public Lectures seeks to erase the usual boundaries between presenter and viewer. A form of horizontality is thus born within the platform, inviting people to contribute in order to bring out innovative forms of dialogue and to meet the challenges of this new means of communication.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet, Christophe Guignard, Gaël Hugo, Laura Nieder, Pauline Saglio
The mirroring system of instant messaging implies the presumed availability of the interlocutor. However, while waiting for a response, certain questions become recurrent: “Alex is online, why isn’t he answering? What is he doing?” Latent* is a chat application that allows you to converse with your friends by developing the context of the discussion and what is not said. Just like theatre, it fuels the conversation by adding didascalies generated according to the collected data (response time, location). By highlighting the unsaid parts of an exchange, the generated reading mode enriches the discussion, creates poetic tension, and allows the interlocutors to become the characters of their own play. www.melaniefontaine.ch
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet, Christophe Guignard, Gaël Hugo, Laura Nieder, Pauline Saglio
Digital DNA is a 3D data visualisation platform that displays an analysis of the content that is shown to me on Instagram. The interface compares the duality of my perception with that of the algorithm. It results in a virtual space representing a digital genome that visitors are invited to explore in order to discover the subtleties of the intersection between human and algorithmic perspectives. While studying these “smart” systems, I became aware that their ability to analyse is somewhat biased. Some of the categories I was assigned were unexpected and did not match the visuals presented. In this way, Digital DNA highlights the gap created by this contrast between the categories and the visuals that are displayed. Try it here
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet, Christophe Guignard, Gaël Hugo, Laura Nieder, Pauline Saglio
Spectacle·s Museum looks at the photographs of visitors in a museum space. Through a web atlas, this project paints a series of portraits in one of the most photographed museums in the world, the Louvre. Using images published on Instagram, the project classifies and groups them according to their formal and spatial specificities. Through Spectacle·s Museum, I approach the theme of the staging of the self, particularly in the museum space.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet, Christophe Guignard, Gaël Hugo, Laura Nieder, Pauline Saglio
Phone Archaeology is an interactive installation that traces the evolution of mobile phones through my own experience. The project reveals a digitalised, speculated, and recovered private life, like traces of the past. This memory engraved in silicon that tends to be obsolete is the story of memories left behind every time we change phones. Research around Phone Archaeology brings to light a form of reflection on our data. The matter of data recovery is intrinsically linked to digital archiving and planned obsolescence. While the abstraction of a digital file may seem timeless, the imminent danger of losing even more digital memories forces us to rethink how we archive them. phonearchaeology.com
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet, Christophe Guignard, Gaël Hugo, Laura Nieder, Pauline Saglio
The Last Forest offers a browser-based walkable forest of spatialised information about collapse in general. Internet users are invited to wander through it and to find posts from the r/collapse reddit community in the form of trees. The categorisation and index provide a more structured browsing of the information contained in the trees. The Last Forest aims to raise awareness about climate change and its potential to end globalised, consumerist civilisation as we know it.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet, Christophe Guignard, Gaël Hugo, Laura Nieder, Pauline Saglio
Per Aspera Ad Astra is a web-documentary that tells the story of five women astronomers who were in charge of discovering, calculating, classifying and mapping the cosmos between 1879 and 1979. This project aims to rehabilitate the crucial contribution made by women in STEM. In the early days, before the word “computer” was used to describe a machine, it was in actual fact used to describe a person, namely the women who made calculations and observations by hand. The “Harvard Computers” significantly contributed to astronomy and science by discovering many galaxies and establishing the stellar classification system that is still in use today. Nowadays, however, we speak very little about these five women; their work remains unknown, and their discoveries have often been attributed to the men who employed them. per-aspera-ad-astra.vercel.app
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet, Christophe Guignard, Gaël Hugo, Laura Nieder, Pauline Saglio
At a time when music can be accessed anywhere and at any time, how can one compose an interactive and evolving album that takes into account its environment? In an ode to strolling around Lausanne, the auditor discovers a polyphonic orchestra while walking through the city’s landmarks. The mobile phone becomes the tool for a composition that features different sound layers, revealed throughout the walk, where the music no longer has a pre-established duration but varies according to the places that are visited. By their geolocation, the listeners/composers initiate new musical tracks as they walk along. A more organic mode of listening is introduced, where compass and binaural sounds reveal the abstract and digital substance that floats around us.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet, Christophe Guignard, Gaël Hugo, Laura Nieder, Pauline Saglio
Alter provides users with a platform to take control of an alter-ego, whose virtual identity is based on archetypes observed on Instagram. The primary intention of the project is to explore the possibility that social networks offer to live experiences that are not our own. Thus, Alter highlights the typical profiles that have been instituted on Instagram over the years. These different archetypes incorporate various ways of showing off, staging oneself or communicating. These archetypes influence, despite ourselves, the way we use certain networks. The project consists of two distinct parts: on the one hand, the observation and study of these different archetypes, and on the other, their use in a webapp.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Angelo Benedetto
Dynamic identity for the fictional art space EVA (Espace Veveysan d'Architecture) proposed by Odran Jobin as part of the Dynamic Display course led by Angelo Benedetto.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Angelo Benedetto
Dynamic identity for the fictional art space GRAM (Galerie Romande d'Art Moderne) proposed by Viktor Gagné as part of the Dynamic Display course led by Angelo Benedetto.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Angelo Benedetto
Dynamic identity for the fictional art space CNAE (Centre Neuchâtelois d'Arts Expérimentaux) proposed by Gary Sandoz as part of the Dynamic Display course led by Angelo Benedetto.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Pauline Saglio, Vincent Jacquier
Fantastic Smartphones – a series of interactive installations developed by students in Bachelor Media & Interaction Design at ECAL, investigating in a critical and offbeat way our relationship with smartphones and the way they influence our daily behavior. See the press room
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet, Christophe Guignard, Gaël Hugo, Laura Nieder, Pauline Saglio
Miksyn is an installation that invites us to rethink our relationship with living things by challenging our natural aversion to the various insects and arachnids of our domestic ecosystem, my primary motivation being to highlight the unexplored richness of microscopic forms. Miksyn is part of research on digital interactions with the microcosm. By decontextualising these tiny creatures under the lens of a high-resolution optical microscope, my project puts the spotlight on their imperceptible peculiarities. Can we use technology to overcome our bodily limitations and awaken a holistic conception of nature?
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet, Christophe Guignard, Gaël Hugo, Laura Nieder, Pauline Saglio
Nowadays, almost all of us have adopted the unconscious reflex of pulling out our smartphone when we are faced with some form of loneliness or passivity. Hence, it has become difficult for us to cope with waiting without the help of our cell phones. The aim of Oblique Reasoning is to invite users to question notions of attention economy and FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) while offering, in the manner of Oblique Strategies, reflections and alternatives. By recording unread notifications and quantifying them in units of time, this portable device offers us the possibility to step back and rethink our relationship with the smartphone.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet, Christophe Guignard, Gaël Hugo, Laura Nieder, Pauline Saglio
In 2020, we reached a tipping point with the mass of man-made artefacts exceeding the biomass on our planet. This is mainly due to an economic system of manufacturing and consumption where the overabundance of objects has become the norm. Overloaded.supply is a semi-autonomous system that exploits the control of creation algorithms in order to question current patterns of design, production and legislation. To do so, the installation allows users, via a physical interface, to control an intangible, invisible and vast universe of objects where they can take possession of them through a fictitious patent document. This document will be stored on a dedicated website that acts as a repository of already protected objects that may or may not be produced. overloaded.supply
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet, Christophe Guignard, Gaël Hugo, Laura Nieder, Pauline Saglio
Confessionnal is a web app that enables users to anonymously confess their behaviour on social networks. With the advent of social media years ago, the behaviour of users varies. Unmentionable acts are sometimes committed on these platforms. This project is inspired by the Catholic confessional as we know it but is based on the digital era we live in. Users live the anonymous experience with a mask as participants or spectators. They confess orally and personalise their mask based on their age, the platform or the main subject of the confession. On the other hand, they can observe other masks and listen to the confessions of other users.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet, Christophe Guignard, Gaël Hugo, Laura Nieder, Pauline Saglio
Is This the Middle East? investigates representation of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) in a selection of video games. I am interested in the patterns, repetitive artefacts, locations and texts in games that claim to be set in the MENA region. These objects become archetypes. Are these photo-realistic environments also realistic in the scenes they depict or do they become another backdrop for war-related games? Using photogrammetry to reconstruct these environments, I address the implications of seeing an abundance of often over-simplified images of the Middle East, especially in a world where video games are becoming not only a global phenomenon, but also a means to encounter other cultures.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet, Christophe Guignard, Gaël Hugo, Laura Nieder, Pauline Saglio
Through a narrative experience, Sanctuaires invites visitors to discover their relationship with plants. This project is structured as an interactive exhibition on the great trees of the city of Lausanne. As in a treasure hunt, visitors have to look for the trees, thanks to clues and a map on the app. When they find one, they connect to it through touch, thus triggering the beginning of the experience. Like a wise storyteller, the sanctuary-tree shares a tale with the visitors, telling them about its sensitive experience and observable universe. Urban tree development coincides with the advent of issues related to the ecological crisis. What do trees have to say about this and how can their perception help us improve our lifestyles?
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet, Christophe Guignard, Gaël Hugo, Laura Nieder, Pauline Saglio
The barrier of entry to sound synthesis software has historically been kept high by visually abstract, overloaded interfaces and expensive ecosystems like those of Pure Data or MAX. Tone Alembic seeks to make sound experimentation accessible to a beginner audience. It does so by offering a platform consisting of a digital interface that abstracts many of the concepts of synthesis in favour of a more visual approach and a set of MIDI controllers that allow more hands-on interaction with the interface while providing everything one needs to get started creating sounds.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet, Christophe Guignard, Gaël Hugo, Laura Nieder, Pauline Saglio
IFTTA (If This Then Authenticate) is a modular authentication kit that allows users to design passwords to access their digital environment. Nowadays the majority of online services require complex authentication from their users. However, our ability to manage our passwords is becoming time consuming: we forget, make mistakes and retype. By default, we have accepted the present systems in place: double verification, SMS, phone calls, e-mails, etc. What if we tried something different? A more personal approach for example. This kit reflects the way we want to view our relationship with passwords. Each of the proposed modules involves a distinct mnemonic interaction: touch, position in space, hearing and sight. These elements can be added up as well in order to design a personalised authentication system.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Gaël Hugo
3DDiscord is a Chrome extension that can be added to an existing Discord system. By bringing new features to the video chat, remote life becomes more human. Project proposed by Iris Moine and Nathanaël Vianin for the Network Related Design course led by Gaël Hugo.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Marcelo Coelho, Gaël Hugo, Pauline Saglio
A new educational model for a post-pandemic world
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Harry Bloch
A website developped during a semestre using a recipe as content chosen by the students during the course Screen Design lead by Harry Bloch, second year Bachelor Visual Communication.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Harry Bloch
A website developed during a semestre using a recipe as content chosen by the students during the course screen design lead by Harry Bloch, second year Bachelor Visual Communication.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet
Content produced during a course given by Alain Bellet to the 2nd year students in Bachelor Media & Interaction Design.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Harry Bloch
A website developed during a semestre using a recipe as content chosen by the students during the course Screen Design lead by Harry Bloch, second year Bachelor Visual Communication.