Schaufenster
A design department as an endlessly zoomable canvas of projects and people, browsed and stumbled upon rather than searched.
A design school should present itself the way its students actually work: as an open, browsable field of projects, not a navigation tree. Schaufenster (“shop window”) was the presentation website and backend I built on that conviction for the design department of my former university, FH Potsdam.
The site is an endlessly scrollable, zoomable canvas of student projects and portraits. You stumble onto things rather than search for them, the same exploration-over-search principle I had developed for large cultural collections. Although the canvas is generated dynamically, the site still behaves like a normal website: every view is linkable and the browser history works.
Built with Vue.js and PixiJS; designed in collaboration with Boris Müller and Franziska Morlok. The site ran from January 2019 until 2026, when the department moved to the university’s main website; an archived copy remains in the Internet Archive.
Images
Left and right arrow keys flip through the pile, Enter enlarges the top image.
