Portrait of Boris Müller

Boris Müller

Interaction Design

Boris Müller is professor for Interface Design at the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam and co-director of the UCLAB.

After studying design at the Hochschule für Künste Bremen (College of Art and Design Bremen), Boris Müller went to the Royal College of Art in London, where he graduated with a Master of Arts in Computer Related Design. His professional career has taken him to MetaDesign in San Francisco, the Institute for Media Communication of the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft near Bonn and the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea (Italy), where he worked as a researcher and visiting professor. Boris Müller has been a professor at the Potsdam University of Applied Sciences since 2004, where he played a key role in establishing the Interface Design programme.

His design work has received several awards like the German Infographics Prize in the “Science” category, the Excellence Award from the Media Arts Festival in Tokyo, or a Certificate of Typographic Excellence from the Type Directors Club New York. As part of his ongoing research, he is currently publishing a series of essays on interaction design and visualization.

Projects

IPPSO

Exploring the Future of Phygital Public Spaces

ARETE

A Visual History of the Latin Alphabet

Topography of Violence

Visualizing Antisemitic Violence in Germany 1930–1938

SENSES

Visualization and Communication of Climate Change Scenarios

Butterfly World Map

Designing a Beautiful Butterfly World Map with Open Source Tools and Public Data

INFORMATION+ 2018

International Conference on Information Design & Visualization in Potsdam

A Brief History of CO2 Emissions

An Animated Short Film on Greenhouse Gas Emissions

Thoughts on Visualisation & Interaction Design

An Essay Series by Boris Müller

VIND

Visualization Interfaces and User Centered Design for Complex Databases

Micro Visualisations

How can visualisations enhance typography?

Probing Projections

Interaction Techniques for Interpreting Dimensionality Reductions

Shifted Maps

Revealing Networks in Personal Movement Data

Culturegraphy

Visualizing Cultural Network Dynamics

Publications

Activities

Invited Talk ● 26 Mar 2025

Institute of Design Research

Boris Müller gives a talk at the Institute of Design Research in Bern. The title of the talk is »Daten → Design → Visualisierung«. He will present and discuss design research activities and strategies from the UCLAB.

Exhibition ● 1 Feb – 1 Aug 2025

ZKM

The 26-year-old project »Ambulator« by Boris Müller is currently on display at the ZKM (Zentrum für Kunst und Medien in Karlsruhe). It is an early visualization of movements through the web and it is part of the exhibition »Choose Your Filter! Browser Art since the Beginnings of the World Wide Web«.

Talk ● 30 May 2023

Infografik AG

Boris Müller and Jona Pomerance present at the Infografik AG – an online lecture series on information graphics and data visualization.

Talk ● 13 Feb 2023

University Tallinn

Boris Müller and Ilias Kyriazis give a talk at the CUDANLab / University Tallinn. The lecture is remote and public. Boris and Ilias present current projects from the UCLAB and talk about the »culturality« of data visualizations.

Outreach Event ● 15 Jan 2021

SENSES

If you are curious about communicating climate change scenarios with data visualization, please join us for the SENSES Outreach Event being held online on 15 January at 2pm (CET).

Conference Talk ● 28 Nov 2020

S-H-O-W conference

Boris Müller talks about »Making and Breaking Rules – Visualisation between Creativity and Usability« at the S-H-O-W conference in Utrecht → video recording

Conference Talks ● 21–26 Oct 2018

IEEE VIS

We take part in IEEE VIS 2018 in Berlin and present visualization research on personal movement data and digital cultural heritage.

Courses

Course ● Winter 2021/22

Virtual Typography

The aim in the course was to design and prototype a text-based information system in Virtual Reality. Students investigated challenges and opportunities, then created prototypes for immersive environments—exploring layout, readability, spatial structure, interaction, and typographic rules.


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Course ● Summer 2018

Visualization of Climate Scenarios

In the course, students will develop visualizations that enable users to explore, understand, and use climate scenarios.

Course ● Summer 2016

Data Objects

The course investigates how abstract data can be transformed into spatial structures. The aim was to create objects of a high aesthetic quality, to convey a message and to have a narrative angle that enable people to both understand a certain fact and to experience data in a spatial environment.


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