Studio Melting Realities
The physical world has weight: bodies, eyes, silence, distance, time. It asks us to stay present, to sit with discomfort, to let relationships unfold slowly and leave traces behind. The digital world, by contrast, moves like a liquid dream: frictionless, weightless, made of fragments, where people can be skipped, blocked, consumed, and forgotten almost instantly after a swipe.
The danger is not that these two worlds exist, but that the rhythm of one is beginning to infect the other. After years spent inside frictionless feeds, we begin to lose patience with complexity, with sadness, and with people who need time instead of speed. We want to scroll past discomfort, to skip the silence. Our physical and digital realities are melting, dripping into a cup of a new, unknown substance.
In this studio, students are invited to study this new liquid: to observe where realities merge, where they fracture, where they seduce, and where they harm. They will question the interfaces, rituals, images, tools, and platforms that shape our experience of the world, while also recognizing their own position within this transformation. Students of Melting Realities are the next generation of designers who will give form to these emerging conditions. The physical and digital realities of the future will not simply arrive. They will be designed by us.
Melting Realities is a place for doubt and naivety. We can only learn by making mistakes.
A series of workshops and assignments will be led by guest tutors and studio tutors, providing students with critical tools and techniques. Students will be invited to position their work within contemporary discourse on digital culture and spatial interaction. By the end of the semester, students will have developed concepts, built prototypes, and formulated a position towards our melting realities.
Students will work both collaboratively and individually across three learning lines:
Physical–Digital Interfacing
This learning line studies the fusion of digital and physical realities, crafting experiences that dissolve the borders between them. By designing for the in-between space, students will create tactile interactions in which screens, sensors and physical objects work together to engage users in unexpected and meaningful ways. These systems respond to presence, gesture and movement.
Communal Presence
Digital technologies have a tendency to isolate humans from one another. The Communal Presence learning line explores how interactive technologies can stimulate real-life social interaction. We will look at environments that invite collaboration, exchange and co-creation, where participants become active agents in shaping a shared narrative.
Spatial AI
This learning line explores how technology can transform spaces into perceptive, responsive environments: spaces that sense, interpret and adapt in real time. By combining technologies such as computer vision and large language models, students will design spaces that create a dynamic dialogue between person and place. We recognise that designing sentient spaces introduces a new design paradigm, one with profound implications. Rather than turning environments into profiling tools, we aim to build spaces that stimulate connection, self-reflection and play.
The Improvement Machine: A Kickoff Workshop by Jonas Lund
In this workshop, we will look at optimisation as both a promise and a trap. Contemporary digital culture constantly offers us ways to improve ourselves: to become more productive, more focused, more creative, healthier, more social, more visible, more efficient and more successful. Through apps, prompts, dashboards, notifications, AI assistants, calendars, scores, tracker, and recommendation systems, everyday life increasingly becomes something to be managed, measured, and adjusted.
Over two days, students will design a small digital system for optimising one part of their own life, practice, body, routine, attention, social behavior or identity. The system should act back: it can give instructions, track behavior, make decisions, generate feedback, assign tasks, produce a score or create a report. Students will test the system on themselves, document what happens and translate the outcome into a visible or tangible form. The goal is not necessarily to make life better, nor to prove that optimisation is bad, but to discover what changes when we allow a system to define improvement.