by Indigo Tschurtschenthaler -

Product/Business idea

After creating value proposition map and business model canvas of the app to report light pollution, I wrote a product idea.

Light pollution is not talked about a lot. In addition, there is not a central platform to report it, and the ones that exist are difficult to use. With this product, I want to make light pollution reporting and research easy and accessible for normal citizens and scientists. This way, I aim to raise awareness on the cause and inform people, in order to fight the issue collectively.

We should care about light pollution and take action against it because it brightens the night sky, it harms nocturnal animals and disrupts biological cycles. By reporting it, we allow biologists to track data and solutions can be suggested to authorities.

The solution I offer is an app that merges reporting and instruction: users can fill out a simple form about the condition of the sky they see, see their contributions, sign petitions, but also navigate a light pollution map and discover the sky thanks to augmented reality. There is also a social media function to let people connect.

The target audience includes nature lovers, astronomers, people living in big cities, people with sleep issues, biologists and ecologists. The first ones can use the app to report and learn, while the other ones can analyse data for research.

With this product, attention can be drawn to the issue, changes in light pollution can be studied, solutions can be found and suggested to authorities. Other than that, users can find like-minded people, learn something new and feel like they made a difference.

The app can make money by selling a premium version with advanced features, like more details on the light pollution map and on the AR version of the sky. Other than that, it would rely on government or charity funds.

by Indigo Tschurtschenthaler -

Value Proposition Map

I created two value proposition maps for my app, one per customer. The first one is for nature lovers and aims to give them a tool to actively protect the environment.

The second one is for biologists and wants to give them a tool to access, filter, organise and export data about light pollution.

I also created a business model canvas to explain the idea.

by muhammad.turk -

Design & Research II – My Product & Business Strategy

Design & Research 2 | For: Katerina Sedlackova

After spending a lot of time mapping out the “system,” I’ve finally landed on a solid plan for what this project actually is and how it works as a business. Here is the breakdown of the Photography Co-Pilot.

The Big Idea

What’s the problem?

Cameras today are too much. You either have a professional DSLR with 100 confusing menus, or a smartphone that does everything for you. This “Automation Gap” means people never actually learn how to take a real photo. They just push a button and hope the AI makes it look good.

Why should we care?

Photography is an art. If the computer does everything, the “human” part of the art dies. Plus, so many young people are buying old cameras because they want that “analog” feel, but they give up because the settings are too hard to learn. We’re losing the craft.

The Solution: An AI Co-Pilot

Think of it as a bridge. Instead of the AI fixing the photo for you, it talks to you. It looks at what you’re trying to shoot and gives you a simple 1-2-3 checklist (on your phone or in the viewfinder). It says: “To get this look, turn this physical dial to f/2.8.” You still do the work; the AI just points the way.

Who is this for?

The main users are students and hobbyists (like the Gen Z “analog” crowd). The people who will actually pay for this are the big camera brands like Nikon or Sony who want to make their gear easier for new people to use.

The Impact

We move from being “Passive Button-Pushers” to “Active Pilots.” It turns frustration into that “Aha!” moment when you finally get a manual shot right.

How does it make money?

We license the “Logic” to camera brands so they can put a “Learning Mode” in their cameras. We also have a pro version of our app for people who want even more advanced guides.

Customer Profiles

To make sure this actually works, I looked at two types of people who really need this help.

Sarah: The Student

Lukas: The Nostalgic Hobbyist

Business Model Canvas

This is the “behind-the-scenes” look at how the project stays sustainable. To make this a real-world product, I’ve mapped out a strategy that involves partnering with the big players in the industry while keeping the focus on the student community.

by muhammad.turk -

Design & Research II – System, Impact, and Inclusion

Design & Research 2 | For: Katerina Sedlackova

Following my prototypes, I am now looking at how my project fits into the bigger world. I have broken this down into three parts: the system, the change it creates, and who can actually use it.

1/3: System Map

This diagram illustrates the broader ecosystem surrounding my camera-AI guidance system. I have mapped it from the core outwards to show how the project connects to the world.

The Core: The interaction between the Photographer and the Manual Camera.
Direct User Context: Students, hobbyists, and “Nostalgic Gen Z” looking for a creative rhythm.
External Ecology: The heavy hitters—Nikon/Sony (Hardware), Adobe/Midjourney (AI), and Instagram (Social). I also included E-waste, as the sustainability of our gear is part of the system.

2/3: Change and Impact (Before vs. After)

This comparison highlights the shift from automation-first snapping to learning-aware photography.

The Goal: The goal is to move the user from being a passive passenger of an automated process to an active “Pilot” who understands their tools.

3/3: Inclusion and Accessibility

Accessibility in photography is not just about “talent”; it is a systemic issue. Using the floating barrier map, I identified the physical and cognitive hurdles that stop people from mastering manual photography.

by muhammad.turk -

Design & Research II – Lo-Fi Prototypes 1/6

Design & Research 2 | For: Birgit Bachler

Following my research on “Automation in Photography,” I have spent this week diving deeper into my project by creating three different prototype scenarios. Even though I haven’t tested these with real users yet, the act of making them helped me see points I was missing and gave me a better direction for my Master’s thesis.

Prototype 1: The Mode Toggle

In this one, when the user opens the camera, they have to choose between two options. One is a Raw Mode where the user has all the control, and the other is an AI Automation mode.

The Goal: To see if forcing the user to pick a mode at the start makes them more intentional about how they want to take the photo.

Prototype 2: The AI Assistant

This is a digital assistant that pops up on the screen while you are shooting. It explains what is happening based on the scene. For example, it might say “increase shutter speed because you are shooting action” or “reduce ISO because there is too much light.”

The Goal: To see if giving the user a “why” helps them stay in control instead of the camera just fixing the settings automatically.

Prototype 3: The External Guidance Tool

This is for professional cameras. A separate device (like a phone) is attached to the camera to guide the user. It shows suggestions on which physical dials to turn to get the right settings.

The Goal: To see if the AI can act as a teacher that helps the user learn how to use the manual settings on their professional camera.

Personal Reflection: Why Prototype Now?

Creating these scenarios helped me see which directions I might follow, but it also left me with a big question about the design process. I understand that if you have a clear vision, prototyping early can save a lot of time. But when you are still in the early stages of defining and understanding the problem, I found it extremely difficult.

To be honest, it doesn’t make total sense to me to build a solution when I haven’t even fully decided what the actual problem is yet. While I know it is supposed to be beneficial, I personally didn’t find it that helpful at this stage. It felt a bit like guessing. However, the exercise did at least show me which side of the camera-AI idea has the most potential, even if the final direction is still a bit blurry.

by artun.sepken -

D&R2 SED – D2

Customer Profile & Value Proposition Map

Persona I – The Deep Worker

A knowledge worker or student who needs extended periods of uninterrupted focus to do their best work. They are productive in flow states but regularly pulled out of them by notifications, messages, and contextual switches. They need a system that protects their attention without requiring constant manual management.

Persona II – The Overloaded Student

A university student juggling coursework, communication apps, and social media across the same device. They struggle to distinguish between urgent and non-urgent signals, and often spend more time managing notifications than doing the actual work. They need a system that reduces the noise without them having to think about it.

Business Idea

What problem are you solving?

Digital interfaces are built to deliver information as fast as possible: but human attention does not work that way. Every interruption carries a cognitive recovery cost that current systems completely ignore. The result is a generation of users who are constantly reactive, chronically distracted, and unable to reach the deep focus states where their best thinking happens. There is no mainstream product that treats attention as a resource worth protecting at the system level.

Why should we care about it?

Attention is not just a productivity concern, it is a mental health issue. Sustained notification overload is linked to higher cortisol levels, reduced working memory performance, and increased anxiety. At the same time, the economic cost of fragmented attention in knowledge work is measurable: studies estimate billions in lost productive hours annually due to interruption-driven task switching. The problem affects every person who works or studies with a digital device which is effectively everyone.

What is the solution? How does it work?

An attention-aware notification layer that sits between the operating system and the user’s apps. It uses behavioral signals: typing rhythm, app dwell time, task duration, time of day, to infer whether the user is in a focused state. When focus is detected, non-urgent notifications are held and batched for delivery at a natural task boundary. When an interruption does occur, the system provides a resumption cue, a lightweight context snapshot that helps the user return to their previous task faster. No manual configuration required; the system learns the user’s patterns over time.

Who is the target audience / customer?

The primary users are knowledge workers and students: anyone whose productivity depends on sustained focus. The paying customers are organizations: companies that want to reduce burnout and increase deep work capacity among employees, educational institutions looking to support student focus, and productivity software companies that want to integrate attention-awareness into their existing tools as a premium feature.

What is going to happen? (Change & Impact)

We move from a model where every moment is equally interruptible to one where digital systems respect the rhythm of human cognition. Interruptions do not disappear, they are timed better. Users reclaim extended focus periods without having to fight their devices to do it. Over time, this reduces the normalization of fragmented attention and establishes a new expectation: that technology should protect focus, not just compete for it.

by artun.sepken -

D&R2 SED – D1

System Map

At the center is the Attention-Aware Interface System, a framework designed to make digital environments sensitive to a user’s attentional state before delivering interruptions, rather than eliminating them entirely. The inner ring holds the direct users: knowledge workers, students, remote workers, and multitaskers, each experiencing interruptions differently based on task type and cognitive load. Surrounding them are the groups that shape interruption conditions: app developers, OS providers, and notification senders and at the outer edge, the institutional forces of employers, researchers, hardware makers, and policy bodies. Together, these layers show that attention is not just a personal resource, it is a systemic one.

Change and Impact

This comparison highlights the shift from interruption-blind digital systems to attention-aware design. Current notification architectures are built around the sender’s intent, not the receiver’s cognitive state. A message is delivered the moment it is sent, regardless of whether the recipient is mid-task, in a flow state, or already cognitively overloaded. The result is a system optimized for immediacy at the cost of sustained focus.

Inclusion & Accessibility

Access to an attention-aware system is not uniform. The ability to benefit from interruption management depends on a range of cognitive, physical, and social factors that are unevenly distributed across users. Some barriers are internal: a person with ADHD may experience interruption recovery very differently from a neurotypical user: for them, even a brief disruption can cascade into a much longer loss of focus. Users in high-stress or high-anxiety states are more vulnerable to the compounding effects of notification overload. Inclusion here is about cognitive and emotional accessibility, not just physical or perceptual access.

by artun.sepken -

D&R2 01 – LoFi Prototyping

New semester, new researches and new problems…Moving from theoretical research into lo-fi prototyping forced me to confront something I had been putting off: my topic is hard to make it physical. Research on attention, interruption and cognitive recovery does not translate naturally into a clickable mockup or a paper sketch. The phenomenon I am studying is internal and time-dependent. You cannot see it on a screen.

The approach I took was a simple behavioural task. A participant reads a short text and corrects errors in it while thinking aloud. I interrupt them once with a spoken question, then observe how they return to the task. To capture focus levels over time, I built a small browser tool; a slider the participant adjusts continuously, which logs their self-reported focus every thirty seconds and marks the exact moment of the interruption. At the end of the session it exports a CSV, so it is easier to track the data. It is low-tech, but it produces real data grounded directly in the literature.


The first test format was a speed dating exercise: five-minute exchanges rotating between participants. The idea is to get fast, varied feedback, and it works well for many types of prototypes. For mine, it was harder to make useful. Five minutes is not long enough for a person to actually get into the task before the interruption happens. Most of the time was spent explaining the setup rather than experiencing it, so the feedback reflected how clearly I could describe the concept more than how the prototype itself worked.

The most consistent piece of feedback was about the setup: having the task on one device and the focus slider on another felt fragmented. Several people pointed out that if I am studying attention, adding friction between two separate tools is counterproductive. It is a fair observation and one I plan to address, consolidating everything into a single interface makes more sense both practically and conceptually.

The session was useful in a different way than I expected. It did not tell me much about interruption and recovery, but it did clarify the limits of the current prototype as a communication tool. My research sits closer to the theoretical end of the spectrum for now, and that makes it genuinely difficult to prototype in a format that works for quick explanation to someone unfamiliar with the underlying psychology.

The plan is to run the full session individually, without the time pressure, in a setting where the participant can actually reach a state of focus before the interruption lands. I also want to think about whether a behavioural experiment alone is the right form, or whether the research needs a more designed artefact alongside it, something that makes the concept visible rather than just measurable.

by ylva.larsen -

D&R2 My passion

Giving used clothes/material new life

For many years now I have loved using old materials and creating new things with it. I use old materials from things like clothes, beddings or curtains, and I create stuff I need/want like purses, bags, new clothing items, wallets, or even shoes. The picture is a collage of some of my creations from a denim recyceling project i am doing.

Last year, I wrote a research paper about the fashion industrys impact on the environment and explored different approaches to addressing overconsumption. One of my key findings was that being involved in making, customizing, or personalizing clothing makes it much more likely that people will keep and care for their garments over a longer period of time. I also found that while buying second hand or thrifted clothing is better than purchasing new items, it is not necessarily as sustainable as it may seem. If people switch to second hand shopping but continue to consume at the same high rate, they still contribute to the ongoing demand for fast fashion on a larger scale. Ultimately, the most effective way to reduce the fashion industrys environmental impact is to lower overall consumption. This can be achieved by keeping clothes for longer and taking better care of them.

I love how sustainable this practice is, and how the things I make are customized perfectly to me and my needs. I also feel more grateful and attached to the things I make myself because I put time and effort into it. For me, doing these crafts give me some time off from real life, where I can sit and sew for example and suddenly 5 hours have gone by without me even noticing or checking my phone once. I would like to be able to find a way to influence and share this feeling with others.  

In design and research 1 I worked with the topic doomscrolling. Researching how social media platforms draw you in and keep you trapped consuming content. I realized that what helps me most of all to stay offline and enjoy the real world are these kinds of physical projects. Therefore, I think a natural continuation into design and research 2 is to explore how i can try to share this hobby with others it might be able to have the same effect on.  

My friends and family often ask me if I can please make them something too or teach them how I did it after I show my projects. Maybe there is a way to show, help, and teach this to everyone?  

My current idea is to create a website people can use to get help on how they can recycle their own old materials into something new.

Possible features of the website: 

  • Patterns for upgrades and remakes 
  • Sewing tutorials 
  • AI that generates patterns customized to your measurements. (maybe a paid subscription?) 
  • Search filters for things like : tools, skill level, time, fabric available  
  • Community forum?  
by amelie.bund -

[DesRes 2 @BirgitBachler] Entry 01: Employee and Consumer Protection

New semester – new me. More or less, at least. While I was extremely confident about my chosen research topic last semester “Creating User-Centered Strategies that align with Business and IT Goals in an innovative Agile Environment. Use Case: Self Checkout Terminals in Supermarkets” the tables have turned.

Rewind – initial idea

Reason No. 1: I initially chose this topic because ever since my internship at Bosch last year I’ve realized how important it is to keep all three feasibility, viability and desirability in mind .

Reason No. 2: The specific use cases of Self Checkout terminals in supermarket seemed like a reasonable extension to the topic, since it aligns with my tasks at my student job. On top, my company would’ve be interested in a collaboration for the thesis.

Long story short: I have gotten to realize that theses matters are already researched through and through.

Motivation – Focusing on employees and/or consumer protection

Instead I would like to contribute something that’s actually innovative and has a social and ethical impact on top. Over the past few years topics such as protection of employees and consumer protection have been on my mind frequently.

Possible idea + 1st Prototype

About two years ago I had the opportunity to participate in an interdisciplinary project called Legal Design Sprint endorsed by the Chambor of Labour Vienna. The project of my team (topic “Mobility”) was even awarded by a team of experts.

Topic Mobility – How do people commute to work?

Two thirds of Austrian employees commute to work by car. [1]

To guarantee a sustainable future this must change. There is a set of alternatives, such as riding the bike to work or using public transport. Nevertheless, these options are limited and raise a few pain points:

  • How much responsibility should be carried upon employers?
  • Which obstacles are people on the countryside facing?
  • How do we convince car drivers to let go of their habits?
  • Are possible alternatives tangible?

Our Solution

With our concept “Business Mobility Strategy” employers must be made responsible for the possibilities of commute that are being offered to their employees. To do this a dialog between both sides – employers and employees – needs to happen.

  1. Interface: The service will be implemented in the “USP – Unternehmensserviceportal” (= the major online service for Austrian businesses).
  2. Data collection: Employers must enter data such as the distance to the nearest bus station or the amount of parking space available for employees.
  3. Less Red Tape: Business owners are constantly exposed to endless and redundant paperwork. Usability Tests will assure a seamless and viable end-to-end experience.
  4. Data Evaluation: Once all the information is submitted the businesses approach and actions towards sustainability in mobility will be graded. This assessment scheme will be defined by experts to guarantee transparency.
  5. Recommended Actions: The evaluation also provides businesses with an answer on how to improve in the topic of sustainable mobility.‍ Employers can set these recommendations as goals to improve rating and help their employees with commuting to work.
  6. Spot Checks: An independent institution will make sure the businesses have submitted their mobility data correctly.

Alternative options:

  • dark patterns in fast fashion e-commerce (e.g. SHEIN)
  • user centered interaction of the “Arbeitnehmer:innenveranlagung”

Reference

[1] G. Kovacic, Cristian Andronic, and S. Kirchmayr-Novak, ÖV-Erreichbarkeit großer Arbeitsplatzstandorte in Österreich. 2022.

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