The master’s project VESTIGO develops an experimental research apparatus that positions design itself as the primary epistemic method, combining participatory inquiry, generative tools, and performative exploration. The work explicitly frames its approach as research through design, emphasizing open-ended experimentation, iterative prototyping, and co-creation with participants rather than hypothesis-testing in a conventional scientific sense . Within this framework, non-designers are treated as domain experts whose embodied decisions and interactions with the instrument generate knowledge about spatial needs and latent desires .
At the core of this methodology is VESTIGO as a performative research platform—a mechanical, tactile “word instrument” that allows participants to strike through, accentuate, or transform poetic language fragments in real time, thereby externalizing inner negotiations between affirmation, doubt, and rejection . This enactment-based procedure shifts inquiry from verbal articulation alone toward material–semiotic inscription, where ink traces, altered paper rolls, and bodily gestures become data that document meaning-making processes between language and space . The project explicitly foregrounds intuition, contingency, and the unforeseeable as methodological resources, aligning the design process with performative research logics that privilege emergence over control .
Award 2025
German Design Graduates
GDG Award Website
Award 2025
Price of the Faculty
HAWK Price of Faculty
Entry 2025
Methodologically, the project integrates qualitative design ethnography—including story-listening interviews, expert conversations, and field encounters in the Tiny Living context—with secondary research across architecture, philosophy, psychology, and consultancy disciplines . These insights feed into generative design research cycles in which the artifact is repeatedly redesigned and tested, allowing the tool itself to evolve as both object and method . The continual oscillation between theoretical reflection and hands-on making is presented as a defining epistemic engine of the project, positioning knowledge as something produced through action, failure, and revision rather than detached observation .
Overall, VESTIGO exemplifies an innovative hybrid methodology that fuses research through design, material culture studies, semiotic inscription, and performative experimentation. By turning embodied interaction, linguistic traces, and crafted artifacts into analytical instruments, the project proposes a mode of spatial research in which needs are not merely surveyed but staged, enacted, and materially negotiated within the design process itself .
Sandra Holzinger: VESTIGO Experimentelles Tasteninstrument und performative Forschungsplattform zur intuitiven Aufspürung von Raumbedürfnissen
Master’s Thesis Project 2025
Supervised by: Prof. Konstantin Haensch, Prof. Patrick Pütz
