Who Designs our
(digital)(next)(uncanny)(interfacing)
Lifeworlds?
Praxis↭theory Seminars at the Hildesheim Faculty of Design Examine Current Interface Cultures and their Opaque Spheres of Production
Qualitative Design Research and Critical Design Praxistheory at the Nexus of Culture, Interfaces, and Strategy at the M.A. Gestaltung program Faculty of Design, HAWK University of Applied Sciences and Arts (Hildesheim, Germany)
Josefine Naß: „Design of Safer Sex. How design changed the condom and how strategy turned it into a brand.“ (2025)
This poster traces a design history of the condom as both a technological artifact and a branded consumer product, showing how materials, forms, and visual strategies evolved alongside shifting moral codes, medical knowledge, and political regimes. Through historical imagery and case-based analysis, it moves from early protective devices to industrial mass production and the emergence of latex, highlighting moments when discomfort, taboo, and innovation collided.
Focusing on marketing, packaging, and corporate identity—particularly in twentieth-century brand strategies—the project frames safer sex as a problem of communication as much as engineering. It reveals how graphic design, advertising, and narrative framing transformed a stigmatized object into a recognizable, trust-building commodity embedded in public health discourse and popular culture.
Josefine Naß: Design of Safer Sex. How design changed the condom and how strategy turned it into a brand.
Seminar work 2025 supervised by: Prof. Konstantin Haensch
This master’s thesis investigates how content strategies on TikTok can contribute to the visibility of artistic practice in jazz. Situating TikTok within the broader digital transformation of music cultures, the study examines how platform logics, algorithmic structures, and short-form video aesthetics reshape the conditions under which jazz musicians can present their work. Rather than focusing […]
This master’s thesis investigates how design can function as a research practice that makes knowledge in intercultural contexts visible and experientially accessible. Based on the project Concepts Trouvés, which examined English-language terms found in Beijing’s urban commercial landscape, the work reflects on how design ethnography and Research through Design can explicate implicit knowledge embedded in […]
This master’s thesis investigates how patriarchal structures and gender stereotypes are embedded in everyday products, spatial environments, and professional design processes. Combining feminist theory, sociological concepts such as Doing Gender, and contemporary design research, the project analyzes historical genealogies of gendered form, materiality, and usability while grounding these perspectives in an empirical user survey. The […]
