The university course, Publicly Augmented, explored the various manifestations of reality-augmenting technologies and their transformative potential in the design of public spaces. The focus was on examining the increasingly blurred boundaries between reality and virtuality, as well as between private and public spaces. The project centered on the following questions: How do we define reality, augmented reality and virtuality? How do navigation systems, audio walks, or interactive advertising displays expand our reality? And how do we want to design the virtual public spaces of the future?

The course began with an article on the crisis of public spaces, which set the critical frame for everything that followed. From there, we looked into the Milgram continuum as a conceptual tool for understanding the spectrum between physical and virtual reality. Together, we developed a catalogue of aspects that a considered and responsible experience should have. Students then took that catalogue into the field, testing specific apps on an excursion and analyzing them against the criteria we had built together. Their findings became the foundation for a final project, which each student realized in a medium of their own choice. The products where shown at HTW Werkschau in July 2025.

Responsibilities#

• course concept
• lessons
• personal consultation

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Media#