Michael Nitsche

Nitsche teaches predominantly students in the Computational Media and LMC undergrads and MS and PhD students in the Digital Media graduate program as well as MS students in the HCI program.
On the graduate level, his teaching is rooted in a material-based design philosophy that emphasizes the importance of balancing interaction design with the material needs of all design components involved. This includes theory and critical discussions as well as experimental practical explorations.
On the undergraduate level, his teaching increasingly leans into issues of environmental awareness. This is reflected in relating projects to local cultural conditions as well as more technical sensing and displaying of hyperlocal environmental data.
His teaching philosophy centers on critical reflection: to explore design, technology, and humanistic relations to both through an ongoing critical dialogue for which the class is the setting. Methodologically, this aims for an experiential learning approach where students are encouraged to explore their own encounters with a challenge through hands on activities. On the graduate level, this also includes encountering open research questions and developing them as part of a class project to blend research and teaching.

Nitsche’s research combines craft and performance to look for novel interaction formats and to design digital media. The approach combines theory and practice and very often mixes both. The goal is to support human creativity in situations where the digital and the material blend into each other.
Core academic communities for this work are: the Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction Design community withing HCI (TEI conference), design research communities such as the Design Research Society (DRS) and Designing Interactive Systems (DIS), as well as media studies communities, especially Game Studies.