Starting from a personal attempt to better understand my own feelings toward coding, I explore the practice of commenting code – something very dear to me. Viewing comments through the lens of marginalia (as in books), I try to imagine them as more than tools for code documentation. To understand why comments are typically confined to this narrow function, I trace their history from the lines I type on my device today back to their papery origins, examining also the broader history of computing, in an effort to better understand the bad vibes I experience within parts of the coding community.

Exit Strategies is a glossary of digital and hybrid spaces, devices, interfaces, actors and interactors. Looking at these the text explores questions of leaving, quitting and exiting. Where to go to next, where does the web end and how to get out in the first place?

In recent years, second-hand trading platforms have expanded significantly around the world. Users of these platforms can easily exchange commodities and contribute to the growth of local economies and communities. This study aims to investigate the design and user experience (UX) of these platforms, including the cultural and environmental impacts that cross platform boundaries. The second-hand trading platforms show significant differences in design and UX across countries. Behind the distinctions, though, are common phenomena that seem to be a shared experience for people worldwide. Through interviews and research, I would like to take the positives from the existing platforms and design a platform to elevate HFBK's secondary trading.

A work about my relationship with my smartphone, narrowed down to the act of swiping. The name refers to the act's dual nature which in the thesis is investigated on many levels: technological vs cultural, tactile vs algorithmic, individual vs shared; and most importantly: left or right.

A mini dictionary on the very topic of swiping, which I hope, despite its subjective approach, can offer points of recognition and certain aha moments to its readers.

About the commodification of our online vulnerability, about what once was a digital comfort space—now forever abandoned in the speculation of authenticity, performing the most emotional self, trying to be saved from the web that they caught us in.

Driven by curiosity about the poetic web, the object of the text rather became the opening of a reflective space, where I could touch on the constraints and possibilities of language, words, worlds, and their artifacts, relation and meaning-making, smoothness, attention, and agency, and see how subtle shifts in understanding allowed for words to restructure and new meanings to grow.

This thesis examines the relationship between coding and design through the lenses of decolonization and unlearning theories. It explores who codes, for whom, and how code shapes our digital world, from local projects to global platforms, despite their vast differences in scale.

Focusing on the historical and socio-political dimensions of coding —including sexism, racism, classism, and capitalism — the study critiques the colonial structures embedded in coding practices. It draws on diverse disciplines to analyze how digital design often amplifies the biases of its analog predecessors.

As a Chilean, the author reflects on the challenges of understanding Chile’s role in global debates on colonialism while navigating a digital world shaped by endless lines of code. Despite the potential for global inclusion, many in the Global South remain on the margins of this evolving digital narrative.

‘Compiling Edge Effects: Notes on Publishing Ecologies’ applies a wider ecological thought to infrastructures of digital publishing - A practice here understood as inherently based on relation.


Roaming through concepts of kinship from nature-culture to network technology, this text asks for the creation of situated knowledges within digital, but always material, realms.

Edges, margins, thresholds: Interfaces are where we meet, intersect with and differentiate ourselves from another.

Linking Nodes explores modes of hypertextual knowledge transfer throughout human history, focusing on interlinked text systems from the 1960s to the Web of today. It juxtaposes them with the ideas of a World Brain (Wells, 1937), the Memex (Bush, 1945), and Xanadu (Nelson, 1966), exploring their visions for a thoughtfully designed global knowledge network. By analyzing early hypertext environments such as FRESS (Brown, 1968), Intermedia (Brown, 1985), and HyperCard (Apple, 1986), it reflects on their approaches to indexing, archiving, and accessibility. Revisiting technological solutions for citation, like transclusion, node granularity and linking mechanisms, such as multidirectional backlinks and fat links, it highlights the innovations of past systems and explores how their principles could inform future implementations.

An Endless Circle of Realizing is an attempted mapping of the geographies of contemporary modes of exploitative digital networks, libidinal drives and the metaphysical dimensions of memetics. It tries to connect descriptive models of current network architecture with psychoanalytical frameworks and a marxist critique of capitalism. The sharing of image macros (memes) across commodified social space on the web distorts and shapes the social, class divisions, perception of normative reality and allows an observation into the collective unconscious. The rise of the affect economy gave way for capital to tap into new ressources but also to fundamentally re-define what it means to manipulate the political sphere in order to sustain itself. The new world forged from this entanglement of capital with a vast technological apparatus, is at the core a continuation of the class war behind the hyper-accelerated facade of what is now known as the culture war.

This thesis investigates the autonomy and virtual agency of generative artificial intelligence (AI) from a 2022 perspective. The first part of the thesis offers a historical overview, focusing on the Western, particularly America-centric, development of AI. The second part presents a series of experiments with text-to-image AI, aiming to capture this technology in its early stages. Through these explorations, the thesis examines AI's materiality and potential for collaborative interaction, offering a timely analysis of its evolving role in society.

This thesis investigates the intersection of artificial intelligence and social biases, specifically within facial recognition systems. It challenges the notion of AI neutrality by exploring how colonial histories and biased datasets contribute to contemporary flaws and ethical issues. The first section examines the historical roots of these biases, while the second highlights their discriminatory effects on racialized communities, featuring insights from artist Adam Harvey on data ethics. The final section envisions a future where these biases are acknowledged, fostering a more ethical evolution of AI.

This thesis explores the interplay between technology and gender through the lens of three seminal feminist techno-resources: Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto (1985), VNS Matrix's The Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century (1991), and Legacy Russell's Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (2020). Each resource emerges from distinct historical contexts, yet collectively challenges the binary system that reduces gender to mere performance based on biological determinism. The Cyborg disrupts traditional gender roles through its exploration of human-machine interactions; the Cunt critiques male-dominated cyberculture; and the Glitch embraces the error as a site of identity fluidity.

This thesis examines how user interfaces have evolved and the role they play in shaping human perception and interaction in the digital age. Starting with early examples like the Command Line Interface (CLI), it traces the development of graphical user interfaces (GUIs) from their origins in military research to their presence in our everyday lives. The thesis explores how these interfaces balance technical limitations with human needs, adapting to become essential tools for work, communication, and social interaction. By examining past and present interface designs, the thesis considers how future interfaces might further shape our digital experiences and asks what we want these tools to become in an increasingly digital world.

This work explores the power structures within Google’s web search in the context of knowledge acquisition and digital interaction. Building on concepts of “power” from Michel Foucault and Miranda Fricker, it examines the role of search engines like Google.

The analysis highlights how technical components such as indexing, ranking algorithms, user interfaces, and features like autocomplete shape user behavior and define their scope of action. It also delves into the connections between search engines, information production, and epistemic injustice. Through case examples and design considerations, the discussion illustrates how search engines filter, structure, and hierarchize knowledge, with significant implications for digital opinion formation.

The thesis examines the challenges and methods of preserving websites and digital content in an age of ephemeral media. While the internet is often perceived as having an infinite memory, digital content regularly disappears or becomes inaccessible. Through analysis of various archiving approaches - from simple screenshots to sophisticated preservation tools - the work demonstrates that no single method perfectly captures websites in their original form and context. The thesis explores how Networks of Care emerge to counter this loss, while examining how algorithmic systems and commercial platforms can create dark archives where content becomes effectively invisible. It argues for open, accessible archiving systems that allow multiple interpretations of preserved content, rather than closed commercial platforms that limit access and reuse. The work emphasizes that digital archives are never neutral but shape our understanding of digital history and culture.

In the master thesis “In Arbeit” (“Work in Progress”), the author explores the meaning and criteria of “good work” within the realm of graphic design. To gain insight, he interviewed Daniela Burger, Prem Krishnamurthy, and Jakob Kirch, discussing their practices, experiences, and the joys and challenges of their work.

Interface of Things explores the evolving relationship between humanity and technology through space, time, and reality, focusing on (semi-)digital perception and extended reality (XR). The thesis traces human evolution from the physical world to the complex interplay of culture and technology. It delves into the philosophical complexities of time, suggesting that our understanding of the future is linked to our interpretations of history and present realities. The work critically analyzes how digital interfaces transform our perceptions and challenge traditional notions of existence.

This study explores merchandise as a phenomenon in the modern creative industries, situated between artistic expression and commercial expansion. Standardized industrial products, now integral to everyday life, have evolved into carriers of stories and identities, with their functional value fading into the background. The term merchandising refers to strategies that boost attention for a primary product through associated items. This work examines merchandise as a medium that conveys and spreads a brand’s narrative, visible across diverse fields—from corporations like Aldi and Berkshire Hathaway to political institutions like the Bundestag. It views merchandise as a tool of an expansive cultural capitalism that transforms cultural values into standardized products, offering new avenues for identity construction and marketing.

The thesis Scamming Interfaces aims to shed light on the history, current, and future strategies of scams, fraud, and deception. It explores how scammers use recent political, economic, and social events, often exploiting stereotypes to make their narratives appear credible. These scams, especially targeting politically unstable regions, frequently present alternative reports that lack verifiable facts. They often take the form of emails, blending elements of comedy and magical realism, making it difficult for recipients to assess their authenticity. By leveraging Eurocentric perspectives and colonial histories, scammers create a sense of solidarity and promise, constructing alternative realities that enhance the effectiveness of their schemes.