MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN

Shana Meinecke – She Kept Playing

by Shana Meinecke

While women make up half of all gamers in Europe, they account for only 7% of participants in esports competitions. The VR project "She Kept Playing" explores the causes of this disparity. Although esports is a relatively young sector, gender stereotypes and misogyny remain. By listening to short stories based on testimonials from professional female gamers, participants directly discover the systemic obstacles these women face. Carried by influential players like Kayane and Loupiote, they serve as powerful role models for the next generation, empowering female gamers to carve out a place in the field without having to worry about gender bias.

MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN

A Story for a Shape – Workshop avec Mélanie Courtinat

with Mélanie Courtinat

Ce workshop explore la paréidolie, notre capacité à projeter du sens et des émotions sur des formes abstraites. À partir d'une primitive géométrique (cube, sphère, cône...), matrice fondamentale de tout univers numérique, les étudiant·e·s en binômes doivent concevoir une expérience en réalité virtuelle. En s'appuyant sur une synchronisation précise entre l'espace physique et un environnement Unreal Engine, le projet transforme ces objets fixes en supports narratifs.

MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN

Betaverse – 2025

with Mario Von Rickenbach

Using a mixed reality headset, the students used their surroundings as playground. Through creative gestures, each experiment proposes a way of interacting with the environment.

MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN

Altered Ego

with Harriet Davey

Who are you in the digital realm? Your avatar, your videogame skin, your alter ego.  Second-year students, led by Harriet Davey, crafted digital alter egos from scratch. They used Daz, Blender, and VR to explore an alternate personality or expression through the digital self.

GRAPHIC DESIGN

MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN

VR Sequences – 2024

with Sami Benhadj

Unofficial VR music video projects created by 2nd-year students in Visual Communication, specializing in Graphic Design and Media & Interaction Design. Working in groups, the students were given full freedom to experiment and develop creative, exploratory, and original approaches, combining narrative and visual worlds. Inspired by selected music tracks, they imagined immersive stagings where sound and image interact to create unique sensory experiences. These projects were carried out as part of the course supervised by Sami Benhadj.

MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN

Wonder Rooms

with Gaël Hugo

During this workshop, second year media & Interaction design students crafted interactive 'wonder-rooms' inspired by curiosity cabinets, blending 3D environments with real-time interactions. A collection of bizarre, imaginative little worlds to be explored.

MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN

GTE: Renens City Stories

with Jack McVeigh

A one week workshop where the first-year students were taught the basics of Blender and how to achieve a similar visual language to that of early era video game graphics. Students were asked to create a looping animation or 'Story' from the perspective of a character in the city of Renens where ECAL is based. These were then packaged into a playable game displayed on a series of CRT monitors controlled using a PS1 controller. The game itself was completely run in Blender using Geometry Nodes & Python.

MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN

INSTANT TOY FOR MUSICIANS – 2024

with Gaël Hugo

Soundtoys coded by 1st year Bachelor students in Media & Interaction Design as part of a semester project led by Gaël Hugo.

GRAPHIC DESIGN

MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN

PHOTOGRAPHY

SYNC SCREEN

with Charlotte Krieger, Jean-Vincent Simonet, Florian Pittet (Sigmasix), Vincent Jacquier, Julien Gurtner, Matthieu Minguet, Cédric Duchêne, EPFL+ECAL Lab, Giacomo Bastianelli

For a week, the first-year visual communications students worked on an installation consisting of 15 screens, accompanied by a 360° sound system developed by EPFL+ECAL Lab. This chandelier, five metres in diameter and suspended from a height of three metres, served as a support for their experiments. Using music specially composed and spatialised for the occasion, the students explored the dynamics of sound both visually and in movement.

MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN

Agents are All You Need

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

Talk to me – 2024

with Alain Bellet

Talk To Me is a series of interactive objects designed by first-year students in the Bachelor Media & Interaction Design program. These creations use dialogue as a playground, drawing inspiration from conversational interfaces to create new forms of interaction.

MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN

From A to B

with Kylan Luginbühl

Video sequences realised during the 3D Graphics course led by Kylan Luginbühl. The videos interpret the From A to B theme, a direct exploration of the passage from one state to another. Projects realised during the 1st year Bachelor Media & Interaction Design.

FOUNDATION YEAR

Option Media & interaction Design – 22–23

with Romain Collaud

Showreel des projets d'étudiant·e·s en Option Media & Interaction Design