"When I was a little boy, I actually wanted to be a magician"

"When I was a little boy, I actually wanted to be a magician. What fascinated me about being a magician was making the impossible possible," says Professor Dr Fabian Hemmert, who has been Head of Interface and User Experience Design in the Industrial Design department since April 2016.

Making complicated technology easy to use

"We try to make technology easier to use," explains the 36-year-old, as systems are becoming increasingly complicated, "but we humans are not getting smarter at the same pace". This is where good interface and user experience design come in: The aim is to make constantly evolving technology simple and intuitive for users to operate. For Hemmert, haptics, i.e. the sense of touch, plays a very important role in this. This is why he is also focussing on the role of the human body in interactions with the digital world. "Digital content is often like soap bubbles for us humans," he explains, "we know what soap bubbles are, but we can't touch them. It's the same with digital content. We know that it's all about zeros and ones, but we can't feel the digital. Unfortunately, we therefore lose out on sensuality and haptic richness." Hemmert illustrates this with his own personality and says: "If I've been working in the digital world all day, I have to go to the gym in the evening because I'm mentally overwhelmed and physically underchallenged." This imbalance is a constant incentive for him to make digital content more tangible for us humans.

A new kind of presentation

The "Data Touch" project is a good example of this. A ring on the finger recognises objects that a presenter picks up - and uses them to guide his presentation. "We tried to control a presentation by having the speaker pick up objects that symbolise the content of the presentation. The computer then automatically jumps to the right place in the presentation that the object represents. You no longer have to press forward x times on a remote control."

For the Gütersloh native, today's Power Point remote controls are comparable to his parents' slide projector remote control, only without the cable. The type of presentation has not changed since the 1970s - the scientist notes, "I think that should change at some point."

Staying human

For him, "staying human" is an essential requirement. One of his horror visions would be the development of mankind into a "Darth Vader" specimen in which the machine has triumphed over man. The science fiction fan says: "What happened to Darth Vader must not happen to us: becoming a mixture of man and machine that will not survive without the machine part." The end of the saga makes him feel reconciled, because "the happy ending at the end of Star Wars is actually that the human side of Darth Vader wins out. He takes off his mask, he sacrifices himself for his son and he dies. These are all human things that a machine wouldn't do."

Lecture at Gamescom

The scientist from Wuppertal is also a welcome guest speaker at various events. At the end of August, he gave a lecture on "Digital-Physical Play" at one of the world's largest games fairs, Gamescom in Cologne. He said: "If we look at the field of computer games, it's quite interesting: for a long time, there were visions of people jumping into the digital world. In the 90s, there were often images in films of people being sucked into the television." However, Hemmert sees much greater potential in games that mix the digital with the physical. "I'm a big fan of geocaching, for example. Although I have to navigate with my mobile phone in my hand, there is fortunately no app that climbs a tree for me to look for a Tupperware box. I think that's much better than Pokémon Go, which takes place almost exclusively on a screen - we should have to get our hands dirty much more often."

Low tech solutions for high tech problems

Hemmert does research by design and creates prototypes that are easy to use. "You try to think research and design together. That can be complicated at first, because research is often seen as something very sober," but "we are building things today that might exist the day after tomorrow. We put them in people's hands today and ask whether or not this is the future they want. This is research by design."

And the results are impressive. Every semester there is a large exhibition that is open to anyone interested, the so-called "id showcase". Hemmert says proudly: "It's very important to us that we don't just work on our ideas in our quiet little room, but that we can talk about them with as many people as possible, who ideally know little about them. And that's why we organise a big public event once a semester. Everyone can come, alumni, external people. And they take a look at everything our students have achieved this semester. The "id showcase" is a really great event."

At the University of Wuppertal, Hemmert appreciates the freedom he needs to develop creative ideas and the openness of his interdisciplinary colleagues.

The little magician also had a plan B as a child. He wanted to become an explorer. "Neither of those things worked out," he laughs, "I'm neither a magician nor an explorer. But design researcher is actually quite a good mix of both, because we build things that don't yet exist and discover new things that way."

The question of how we could deal with technology in the future therefore remains exciting.

Uwe Blass (interview from 06/09/2018)

Fabian Hemmert studied media design and interface design in Bielefeld and Potsdam. He completed his doctorate in Berlin. He has been a professor of interface and user experience design at the University of Wuppertal since 2016.