Katharina Tillmanns is a post-doctoral researcher, experience designer, and lecturer working at the intersection of Media Studies and Experience Design with a focus on Mixed Reality (XR) at the Cologne Game Lab, TH Köln. Her research and design practice explore how interactive and immersive media create meaningful, emotional, and embodied experiences, with a particular interest in the expressive and transformative potential of emerging media.
In 2026, she completed her doctorate in Media Studies at the University of Cologne in cooperation with TH Köln. Her dissertation, The Art of Somatic Design for Mixed Reality – A Body-Centered Design Approach to Enhancing Meaningfulness, Engagement, and Comfort in Immersive Worlds, develops a somatic approach to the design of Mixed Reality. At its center is the Somatic Design Method, a body-based design framework that engages breath, posture, movement, voice, and social connection as modalities for designing immersive experiences.
Her research combines theoretical inquiry with research-creation and experimental design practice. Across artistic and applied research projects, she has explored Mixed Reality, embodied interaction, location-based experiences, cultural heritage, game-based learning, and transformative forms of play.
Tillmanns has led and contributed to numerous research and development projects on regional, federal, and European levels. Her work includes projects such as BorderZone, Porta Praetoria C.C.A.A., Airtime VR, Phone Home, Interconnected, Fingertips, and Modern Tribe. She is a former co-president and founding member of Games for Change Europe and the initiator and Festival Director of SomaFest XR, an international platform for research and artistic practice around body-centric approaches to immersive media.
Teaching
- Introduction to Mixed Reality – Cologne Game Lab, TH Köln
- Body-based Design for XR – Cologne Game Lab, TH Köln
- Introduction to Artistic Research – Cologne Game Lab, TH Köln
- Introduction to Research-Creation – Cologne Game Lab, TH Köln
- History of Immersive Media – Cologne Game Lab, TH Köln
- Impact Games – Cologne Game Lab, TH Köln
- Mixed Reality in Cultural Mediation – University of Cologne
- History of Audiovisual Arts / Game and Media Studies – ifs Internationale Filmschule Köln
Research Priorities
Katharina’s research explores how interactive and immersive media create meaningful, emotional, and aesthetic experiences. She is particularly interested in the relationships between narrative, play, embodiment, and meaning-making, and in how these qualities can be employed in playful and game-based learning, cultural mediation, and transformative experiences.
Her work is grounded in a deliberately broad understanding of Mixed Reality. Rather than treating Mixed Reality as a set of technologies, she understands it as a design space for orchestrating relationships between bodies, physical and virtual spaces, digital artifacts, narrative, and interaction.
This perspective extends beyond conventional definitions of AR and VR and encompasses a spectrum of hybrid experiential constellations: from exhibition spaces as meta-experiences surrounding digital artifacts, through motion-controlled and location-based experiences, to augmented virtuality and fully virtual environments.
Across these constellations, her research investigates how aesthetics, narrative, playful interaction, spatiality, and embodied experience shape emotional engagement and meaning-making, and how these qualities can be translated into design approaches for learning, cultural heritage, and other experiential contexts.
Core research topics are:
- emotional and narrative experience design
- aesthetics and meaning-making in interactive and immersive media
- playful and game-based learning
- Mixed Reality and hybrid experiential spaces
- embodied and body-based interaction
- spatial, motion-controlled, and location-based experiences
- cultural heritage and cultural mediation through immersive media
- transformative and socially engaged play
Research Projects (selection)
Somatic Design Method (2026–ongoing)
Building on her doctoral dissertation, Katharina is further developing the Somatic Design Method as both a research framework and practical design methodology for immersive media. Current work focuses on transferring body-based design principles into design education, research-creation, artistic practice, and interdisciplinary XR development. The research investigates how somatic modalities—including breath, posture, movement, voice, and social connection—can systematically inform the conception, prototyping, and evaluation of meaningful immersive experiences.
Lust/CTRL VR Lab – BRITNEY X Festival, Schauspiel Köln (2024)
Katharina conceived and led the artistic research framework for the Lust/CTRL VR Lab, a research studio developed during the Cologne Game Lab’s Profile Week and premiered at the BRITNEY X Festival at Schauspiel Köln. The student research project explored intimacy, touch, proximity, desire, and control through a series of experimental VR experiences. The lab served as a research-creation environment investigating how embodied interaction can generate meaning and emotional experience beyond visual representation.
SomaFest XR (2023–ongoing)
Katharina is the founder and Festival Director of SomaFest XR, an international research-creation festival dedicated to body-based approaches to immersive media. She conceived the festival as a platform connecting artistic practice, academic research, and industry to explore embodiment as both a design material and a mode of knowledge production. Through workshops, performances, exhibitions, and scholarly exchange, SomaFest advances the discourse on Somatic Design and embodied XR.
BorderZone (2021–2024)
BorderZone is a location-based Mixed Reality experience developed in collaboration with the Stiftung Preußische Schlösser und Gärten Berlin-Brandenburg, enabling visitors to explore the history of the German division at Park Babelsberg. As Principal Investigator, Katharina was responsible for the project’s user experience design and contributed to its overall research direction. Her work focused on how bodily movement, spatial interaction, and environmental context foster emotional engagement and embodied meaning-making within cultural heritage experiences.
Airtime VR (2016–2017)
Airtime VR is a motion-controlled virtual reality paragliding simulator developed in collaboration with Papillon Paragliding. Katharina was responsible for the experience design, investigating how bodily movement, posture, and multisensory cues could create convincing sensations of flight while supporting comfort and presence. The project laid important foundations for her later research into embodied interaction and Somatic Design.
Porta Praetoria C.C.A.A. (2015–2017)
Porta Praetoria C.C.A.A. is a location-based augmented reality game prototype developed as the outcome of the EPPSA project (2015–2016) and the subsequent HisToGo project (2016–2017). Katharina was responsible for the game’s experience design, combining collaborative gameplay, embodied interaction, and situated storytelling to make Roman Cologne accessible through playful exploration. The project investigated how bodily movement, spatial context, and social interaction can foster meaningful engagement with cultural heritage, laying important foundations for her later research on body-based design and Somatic Design.
Contact
| Email: | kt(at)colognegamelab.de |
| Phone: | +49 221 8275 – 3095 |