Institute Team

Board:

Dr Gernot Tscherteu DI Wolfgang Leeb Dr Martin Tomitsch Dr M. Hank Haeusler

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Team biographies:

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Dr. Gernot Tscherteu

Gernot Tscherteu studied political science at the University of Vienna. He wrote his dissertation about the influence of digital media on the development and communication of knowledge at the Institute for Scientific Research and Theory with supervisor Prof. Helga Nowotny and Prof. Ulrike Felt. Since 1991 he has worked as interface and interaction designer and researcher. He has managed several industrial collabortion projects at the Austrian Academy of Science, the Academy of Applied Arts, EDVG, Sysis AG, ZKM Karslruhe, MQ Wien, Caritas Austria and Belleville CH and made numerous publications. In 1999 he founded the architectural and design practice planhaus in collaboration with DI Claudia Pöllabauer. Between 2002 and 2005 he worked as coordinator for the LED project „Leuchtathletik“ at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna Co-organiser of Media Architecture Conference 2007, manager of research consortium mediafacade.net, a group comprising design consultancies and major architectural and manufacturing companies and research institutions, which aims to develop standardised state-of-the-art technology for media facades. 2008 curator of Media Facades Exhibition Berlin 2008 and co-curator of Media Facades Festival 2008. Organiser of the Media Facades Summit 2010.Initiated and co-curated Media Architecture Biennale 2010. http://www.realitylab.at/ http://www.mediafacade.net . DI Wolfgang Leeb Wolfgang Leeb is an architect and architectural photographer, working at planhaus and realitylab since 2002. Constantly skimming the web in seek of new media architectures. http://www.realitylab.at/ http://www.wolfleeb.com/ Dr. Martin Tomitsch Martin Tomitsch works as lecturer and researcher at the Design Lab, which is a research discipline within the University of Sydney’s Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning. Before moving to Sydney he was working and teaching at the Research Group for Industrial Software in Vienna where he was also involved in several projects as usability consultant. At the University of Sydney he currently teaches Interaction Design and Human-Computer Interaction.He has a background in Informatics with a special focus on Human-Computer Interaction, which he studied at the Vienna University of Technology and the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) Stockholm. During his Master’s degree he spent six months at the in situ research lab at the University of Paris Sud. While working on his PhD he visited the Key Centre for Design Computing and Cognition in Sydney doing research on interactive media facades. He currently works on several research projects that involve the design of urban screens and the exploration of new forms of interaction to elicit user engagement and social interaction. Human-centred design and evaluation methodologies represent a core element in his research. His work has been published at international conferences on Human-Computer Interaction and Ubiquitous Computing and exhibited at the Visual Connections exhibition in Sydney. http://www.arch.usyd.edu.au/design_lab http://web.arch.usyd.edu.au/~mtomitsch/ . Dr. M. Hank Haeusler Dr. / Dipl.-Ing. (FH) M. Hank Haeusler has been employed from October 2008 as a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Technology, Sydney. Since 2009 Haeusler has been the node convenor for the research cluster Simulation Interaction Media (SIM) at UTS’s Centre for Contemporary Design Practices (CCDP). He finished his PhD thesis ‘Spatial Dynamic Media Systems’ (VDM publishers, 2010) at SIAL / RMIT University, Melbourne supervised by Professor Mark Burry in October 2007 and received the RMIT University Research Prize in recognition of the achievement of excellence in a Higher Degree by Research Program assessed in 2008. He is author of four books listing publications such as ‘Media Facades – History, Technology, Content’ (avedition, 2009) and ‘Chromatophoric Architecture – Designing for 3D media facades’ (Jovis, 2010), several book chapters and conference papers. He has taught and given lectures in Europe, Asia, North America and Australia at several universities and conferences. He joined the Media Architecture Institute in 2011. The research project allows Haeusler to extend his interest in media facades beyond his current research through the social / public agenda investigated in the project. He also can extend his network to well established firms and designers and feed this new knowledge into his work in Sydney, Australia. . Dr. Oliver Schürer Author, Curator, Editor, Senior Scientist at the Department of Architecture Theory Vienna University of Technology. Numerous international publications on technology and economy in Architecture. Recent books are ‘architektur:consulting’ and ‘Berufsfeld Architektur 1.0’. Visiting Researcher at the Departement of CAAD at the ETH Zürich 2006-09. Here he founded together with Georg Vrachliotis the research area ‘Theory of Technology in Architecture’ in 2007. Together with Gernot Tscherteu he founded the ‘Media Architecture Group’, 2005 and in 2010 the ‚Media Architecture Institute’. In 2007 he was co-curator of the Media Architecture Conference, London St. Martin. In 2008 he was curator of the Media Facades Conference Berlin 2008 and co-curator of Media Facades Festival 2008,
 Berlin. Current area of research ‘The Automation of Architecture’. www.a-theory.tuwien.ac.at/Profiles/Oliver . Tobias Ebsen Tobias Ebsen is a researcher, designer and artist working with media art installations. Since 2008 he has produced and co-produced a number of installations and experimental prototypes that explores the potentials of digital technology in public space. He is currently a PhD candidate at Aarhus University in Denmark at the Department for Aesthetics and Communication. His dissertation investigates the materiality of electronic screens as an artistic approach to media art and media architecture. Along with his research he teaches Interaction Design and produces experimental installations at the Center for Advanced Visualization and Interaction (CAVI). During his career Tobias Ebsen has collaborated with professional dancers, musicians and architects in the various projects he has engaged in. surfacefracture.com . Ben Stricker B.A. Ben Stricker is living in Bielefeld/Germany. In 2003 Ben started his own business and worked as an independent event designer mostly for clubs and consumer events in Germany. Since 2007 he has studied at the Detmold School of Architecture and Interior Architecture located in Germany. He is currently undertaking a master’s degree in interior architecture. Since 2008 he has dealt with technical development in the field of architecture. During a student project in 2009 Ben developed an innovative LED lamp and received an award for his work from the notable swiss company Zumtobel Lighting GmbH. As part of Bens Bachelor Thesis in 2010 he developed a walk-through 3D Voxel-Display. At the beginning of 2011 he spent 4 months as a project leader at Urban Aid, a bureau for media architecture in Sydney, Australia. During this time he was responsible for the development of a pavilion with interactive surfaces. In August 2011, he started his research project, ‘the pixel project’, which investigated how to integrate pixels almost invisibly into spatial structures.