Akustische Welten

Poster · infographic · film

Affinity Designer

Poster

Infographic

Editorial

Premiere

Role

Concept, design & film, with Henrik Brandt

Year

2026

A university project on what headphones actually do. They don’t play music into a room, they replace the room. An object analysis turned into one metaphor, the headphone as the tractor beam of a spaceship, and that metaphor then had to carry a poster, an infographic and a short film. Five poster versions across two experiments, each one killed by the feedback round after it. Documented as a 20-page book, and the spreads below are that book.

The title page of the documentation: AKUSTISCHE across the top, WELTEN across the bottom, a headphone in the middle throwing a green beam down between the two words

01 — The problem

How do you show something invisible?

The object was a pair of headphones. Ask what the thing does and the obvious answer is: it plays music. The interesting answer is that it replaces the acoustic space you are standing in. That is the thesis and it is also the design problem, because the transition from one sound field into another has no picture. It can’t be photographed, so I had to invent one. The answer came from cinema. A projector throws light into a room and creates a world that isn’t physically there. From that point on, the metaphor decided what belonged in the project and what didn’t, which is a lot more work than a picture usually does.

Two book pages side by side: the introduction with a headphone shown as a beam between two ear cups, and the poster chapter carrying the project’s guiding metaphor in large type

02 — The iterations

Five versions, three of them wrong

Nothing here was a redraw for its own sake. Every version went into a feedback round and came back with one specific fault, and that fault is what the next version answers. The order matters: first the content was wrong, then the composition, then the copy length, then the type hierarchy.

Book page showing three poster versions side by side, each with a green beam, numbered 01 to 03 with a short note under each

Book page with two larger poster versions: a diagonal beam with running text, and the final poster with headline and two text blocks in a right-hand column

03 — The infographic

Same beam, different logic

The infographic reuses the beam motif but it can’t be built like the poster, because here the numbers carry the statement and not the body copy. So the reading order is designed around figures. The real layout problem was the distribution of text and whitespace: early versions stacked everything on the left and left the right side empty.

Two pages side by side: the written build-up of the infographic, and the finished infographic with a headphone projecting a vertical beam, statistics left and right and a Venn diagram

04 — Planning & the film

Structuring it, then killing the live experiment

Between the artefacts and the presentation sat the part nobody photographs: deciding what the five minutes in front of an audience actually had to do. A Speakery canvas and a mindmap forced the argument into three acts and one north-star sentence, Klang ist kein Hintergrund. Klang ist der Raum, in dem du lebst. That structure is what made the next decision easy.