Today, 29/1/2026, we had what was called a “Final Crit.” It wasn’t really a class, but rather a 25-minute one-on-one meeting with Horst Hörtner from Ars Electronica. I went into it still feeling unsure about my master’s thesis topic, and I left with a much clearer sense of what I am not doing anymore, and where I need to look next.
Most of our conversation focused on how I have been framing my topic so far: communicating social anxiety through tangible interaction. While this sounds coherent on paper, I realized during the discussion that it doesn’t fully translate to what I actually want to achieve. Social anxiety is a broad and complex subject. It is experienced differently by everyone, and it can easily become abstract or even misleading if you try to “represent” it too directly.
When I talked about my project, I noticed that I kept drifting into the technical side: how to visualize anxiety, how to show it, how to make it interactive. But that is not really my core intention. I am not interested in creating a visual metaphor of anxiety. What I care about is how people feel in certain spaces and situations, and how interaction design can shape that experience.
One of my initial ideas was to create a space that does not make people feel like they are performing or being put in the spotlight. The feeling of being watched, judged, or evaluated is something many people with social anxiety experience strongly. I wanted to avoid designing something that forces visitors to act, react, or expose themselves. Instead, I imagined a space where interaction is optional, slow, and self-directed.
At the same time, the meeting reminded me of something important: there is no single experience of social anxiety. Some people feel uncomfortable around strangers, while others feel safer with people they do not know. Some enjoy attention, others avoid it. We can never fully know how someone feels when they enter a space. That makes the task more complicated, but also more interesting. It means I am not designing for a fixed emotion, but working with uncertainty, subjectivity, and difference.
What became clearer to me is not a final answer, but a shift in how I need to think about the topic. Instead of trying to “show” social anxiety, I need to rethink what my role is as a designer in relation to it. The question is less about representation and more about how my own perspective, values, and experiences can shape the way I approach this subject.
I don’t yet know what the final form of the work will be. But I do know that I need to move away from purely technical solutions and spend more time clarifying what I actually want to communicate through interaction, space, and material.
AI was used for corrections, better wording, and enhancements.
