Welcome

i am associate professor at the vienna university of technology, faculty of informatics, at the institute of design and assessment of technology, human-computer interaction group.

my research centers around questions of the interplay between design and (software) development, especially the role and place of design in software engineering. also, i’m working in the field of »informatics and society«.

since 2007, i’m the coordinator for the »media informatics« bachelor and master curricula at vienna university of technology.

since august 2006 i am austrian representative to IFIP TC14, the "Technical Committee on Entertainment Computing".

since early 2005 i am associate professor for interactive systems. my habilitation discusses history, theory and practice of design methodology, focussed on the design of interactive software.

i am (co-)winner of an award of distinction at the prix ars electronica 2000 in the category .net, together with erich berger and volker christian (and many others) for the project telezone.

i majored in informatics in vienna, and have since focussed on the issue of design within informatics. in the course of my work i founded and led the uid-lab, a cooperation with gp design partners, where we worked on numerous national and international design projects between 1996 and 2004. among the clients were ars electronica center, the cd-labor für software research and the german Sparkassen-Informatikzentrum. uid-lab has spun off into a design enterprise and is now part of gp design partners.

rather than anything else, i would label me as an “experience designer” in the sense of bill buxtons book, “sketching user experiences“. on a global level, this means that i’m also deeply interested in the interplay between the co-development of technology and society, and especially in questions of sustainability and resilience of technology.

a few of the projects that keep me busy.

:: SAD project

a social media experiment, in collaboration with sylvia purgathofer-müller, alexander kraicsich and sarah naber. [link]

:: sparkling fingers

open source DIY e-learning tools for blind kids. together with armin wagner, georg kaindl, josef schuh, wilfried reinthaler. more information: sparkling-webseite

:: serious beats

social gaming as catalyst for real-life communication.

together with fares kayali and in cooperation with the institut for journalism and communication sciences. [link]

:: landspotting

developing games that help categorize land use. with josef schuh, in this cooperation with IIASA laxenburg. [link]

:: 3d printing

i believe that 3d printing is on of the »next big thing«s. no immediate project, but lot of exploration.

:: slidecasting 2.0 & the radical portfolio

among others, we won the main price at the e-learning-awards of vienna ut in 2008. project lead. on hold.

:: electronic/internet voting

i believe that using electronic means to support voting leads to massive technological, social and democratic deficits. therefore, i resolutely oppose all forms of e-voting. more on e-voting on papierwahl.at.

a selection of interesting projects located around my activities.

:: game design as game play is a master thesis from 2011 by clemens mautner-markhof. he designed and implemented a prototype of a facebook game.

:: my colleague geraldine fitzpatrick has been named »expert of the month« by derstandard.at in sept. 2010.

:: after a couple years of development, the innovative and fun platformer and yet it moves has been released on april 2nd, 2009. the team developed concept and prototype for this game during one of our courses.

congratulations to the project team, and all the best!

:: the grimace project is one of the results of the thesis of my diploma student oliver spindler - a very cool implementation of some theories from scott mcclouds latest book making comics.

:: a dissertational student of mine, barbara ondrisek has won a dr. maria schaumayer-award for her dissertation about the security of electronic voting (which has been published as a book). congratulations!

:: one of my alumni, gerhard obernberger, is part of a project team (just like his diploma thesis was part of the project point-to-discover) that won the first price at the nokia ubimedia mindtreck award 2008. congratulations!

:: georg kaindl, one of my diploma students, wrote as his diploma thesis Touché, a multitouch tracking environment for OS X 10.5. it’s not only cool, it’s also free and open source. it’s been widely used, among others in this installation.

:: 2007/08, eva ganglbauer redesigned the user interface of the infinica document designer in the course of her master thesis.

MindNode is an application designed and written by alumnus markus müller.

a few more recent and/or more important publications.

diane salter, peter purgathofer: students use of laptops in large lecture classes: distraction, partial attention or productive use? ed-media, toronto, 2010.

peter purgathofer: eine kurze geschichte der steganographie. in: manuela brandstetter, marina schmidberger, sabine sommer (hg.): die funktion "verdeckter kommunikation", lit verlag, 2010

paula kotzé, peter purgathofer: designing design exercises – from theory to creativity and real-world use. HCIEd, 2009.

peter purgathofer, wilfried reinthaler: exploring the »massive multiplayer e-learning" concept. ed-media invited talk, vienna, 2008.

peter purgathofer: die schwierige frage von digitalen spielen und gewalt. in konstantin mitgutsch, herbert rosenstingl: faszination computerspielen: theorie - kultur - erleben. 2008

fares kayali, peter purgathofer: two halves of play. simulation versus abstraction and transformation in sports videogames design, 2008. nachdruck im buch “Sports and Media” (vorl. titel), erscheint vorauss. dezember 2008 bei icfai university press.

purgathofer, p.: eine kleine geschichte der überwachung. in sandro gaycken, constanze kurz:1984.exe - gesellschaftliche, politische und juristische aspekte moderner überwachungstechnologien. 2008

peter purgathofer: is informatics a design discipline? 2006

office hours di 10:15-12

argentinierstr. 8/187

2.stock

1040 wien

fon +43 1 58801 187 23

fax +43 1 58801 187 93

email purg(a)igw.tuwien.ac.at

twitter peterpur

:: a long interview with SAD project collaborator sarah naber was published in derstandard.at 2011 [link]

:: i am one of the 115 co-authors of L3T, the definitive book on open learning ressources. martin ebner and sandra schaffert made a very funny promo video that includes a very substantiated quote by me ;-)

:: in october 2010 i made a short movie documenting the showcases our group set up for new students on »beginners day«.

:: i was invited to TEDx Pannonia 2010 to talk about the radical portfolio. a preliminary recording of the talk is available on youtube, and the slide can be viewed on slideshare. oh, and my TEDx application is also still on youtube.

:: zOMG - in november 2009, a monster interviewed me about digital identities! It’s up on youtube

:: tim pritlove interviewed me in 2009 in one of his legendary chaosradio express podcasts, CRE131. you can listen to the full version or just a few highlights.

:: my talk about “e-voting - accessibility vs. risks” at the a-tag 08 is available as slides at slideshare.net, as audio recording and as transcript. also, i have generated a word cloud from the transcript using wordle.net.

:: our simulation of the play-off phase of EURO08 at kunsthalle project space within the exhibition games. their present-day role in art and politics is subject of an article on wieninternational.at. additionally, students produced a documentation video (2008).

:: at the politcamp graz 2008, i was invited to talk about e-voting. since i could not travel to graz, i gave the speech via iChat AV. surprisinly, this worked very well: vgl. prva.at, entscheidend-bist-du.at, politcamp.at.(2008)

:: rodd lucier from canada talked to me about slidecasting 2.0 via iChat AV. he recorded our conversation, cut out the boring bits and put it online. (2008)

:: my talk at the deepsec-conference in 2007 about evoting was recorded on video.

:: gp design partners produced online documentation for some of our joint design projects during the time of uid-lab: cure, k2, telezone and mocca (2005).

also, i pretend to be a photographer, media designer and, occasionally, a musician. also, i play pro evolution soccer on a semi-pro level.

:: explorative design

master-level full year project with a focus on design theory and design-based research.

essential sources are henrik gedenryds dissertation »how designers work«, bill buxtons »sketching user experiences« and donald schöns »educating the reflective practitioner«. together with eva ganglbauer.

:: gesellschaftliche spannungsfelder der informatik

profound discussion of the friction between social and technological development (eg. copyright, privacy, spam, etc.), mainly organized along helmut spinners concept of “knowledge order”.

:: interface & interaction design

while the principal organizer of this lecture is geraldine fitzpatrick, i contribute a framework of design theory to help the students contextualize the content.

:: prolog

i am one of the lecturers at the informatics prolog, trying to help first semester students finding their way around the university.

you can find all my courses on [TISS]

due to a serious work overload and an injury, i had to drastically reduce my lecturing activity.

i am on a discussion panel on »constructing alternate realities: Independent game design and tactics of persuasion« at the tef vienna expert seminar vienna, »Play and Prosume« on july 13, 15:30.

i’ll be giving a keynote at the 14th international conference on interactive collaborative learning on sept. 21st. [link]