Master Thesis at the Chair of Integrated Product Design
Become a Master
30 ECTS | Master Thesis
The Chair of Integrated Product Design offers a diverse range of Master thesis topics at the intersection of product, design, interior spaces, creativity, generative AI, and technology-driven research methods. Below, you can find a current list of available topics. For more details, check out the PDFs available for download. New thesis topics will be added regularly, so check back regularly for updates.
Who can do a Master Thesis with us?
We’re open to students from all kinds of study programs – including (but not limited to): Architecture, Mechanical Engineering, Human Factors Engineering (HFE), Management & Innovation, Information Systems, and Science & Technology Studies (STS). Your field not listed? No problem – feel free to reach out anyway if you’re interested!
Interested?
If you are interested in one of our Master thesis topics, just send us an email to thesis.ipd@ed.tum.de with the subject line of your requested thesis topic. In your email, please include: your preferred starting date, a brief motivation for your interest in the topic, your resume and selected portfolio samples.
Important note
If you take on a thesis with us, it's mandatory to attend our seminar “Methodical Development of Research Questions” – it's where we help you shape and sharpen your Master thesis topic.
Thesis Topics
| Schrödinger's Room | Can a space exist in more than one experiential state at once? Inspired by the thought experiment of Schrödinger's cat, this Master thesis explores how architectural space can create ambiguous or even contradictory experiences depending on the observer's position, movement, and presence. You will investigate precedents from architecture and art, such as the work of James Turrell (Adcock, 1990), Robert Irwin (Weschler, 2008), Dan Graham (Alberro, 1999), Olafur Eliasson (Grynsztejn, 2007), and SANAA (Hasegawa, 2006). Through physical experiments with light, reflection, transparency, and sound in our Spatial Experience Lab, you will then design one or several small, inhabitable spatial portals for selected locations on campus, in the city, or in the landscape, developed through drawings, visualizations, and a full-scale prototype. The thesis can be conducted individually or in a team of up to three, and may optionally be submitted to the international Archcontest competition "Schrödinger's Room" (deadline January 25, 2027). | more details (.pdf) |
| Design of a wearable metabolic sensor | How do you turn a working piece of laboratory equipment into a device someone would willingly wear during a workout? In collaboration with the group Sensors and Wearables for Healthcare (Prof. Can Dincer), this thesis takes on the industrial design of a face-worn sensor that measures respiratory gases — oxygen uptake (VO₂), carbon dioxide output (VCO₂), and breath lactate — continuously and in real time during exercise. The sensing already works; the object does not yet. You will begin with a short review of the wearable and respiratory-mask landscape (CPAP masks, sports metabolic systems, respirators) and of the ergonomic and anthropometric principles behind face-worn products. You will then develop and physically prototype housing and mask concepts in our lab (FDM and resin printing), resolving two central constraints: an airtight seal across a range of face shapes (a leak invalidates the measurement, making this a hard requirement rather than a comfort preference) and enough comfort to wear during exertion. Unusually, the electronics are not fixed — the hardware layout can be adapted to your design rather than the reverse, so form can genuinely drive architecture. Finally, you will test your concepts on real subjects through our collaboration with the Chair of Exercise, Nutrition and Health, evaluating fit, seal integrity, and comfort, and consolidate the results into a manufacturable design direction. If the outcome of your thesis allows, we will jointly publish the results in an academic design journal or conference proceedings. | more details (.pdf) |
| Slow AI | Generative AI is built for speed: type a prompt, receive a solution. This frictionless flow may come at a cost. Recent HCI work has raised concerns that efficiency-focused AI in creative practice can lead to creative exhaustion and diminished agency among designers (Van Der Burg et al., 2026). When AI delivers ready-made ideas, creative professionals risk shifting from generating their own thoughts to selecting between the AI's, quietly outsourcing the effortful work of imagination (Risko & Gilbert, 2016). This thesis takes the opposite approach and asks whether a GenAI interface can be deliberately designed to slow down, to ask rather than answer, and to provoke rather than deliver. You will design and build a working GenAI interface (for example a browser extension, a chatbot wrapper, or a custom web app) that introduces frictional interaction patterns drawn from recent work on Slow AI (Kim et al., 2026): question-first responses, delayed suggestions, explicit uncertainty markers, or prompts that push back rather than deliver, positioning the AI as critic or provocateur rather than as solution provider (Dreyer et al., 2026). You will then evaluate the interface in a comparative user study with creative professionals working on a design futuring task, contrasting the frictional interface with a standard GenAI baseline. The task builds on the AI-supported futuring method developed at our chair (Thoring et al., 2027), in which imagination is central to the exercise and to the cognitive offloading of a particular concern. Measures include the temporal distribution of the creative's work (time spent developing own ideas versus engaging with AI outputs), perceived agency and ownership, cognitive load, and short interviews on the experience. An optional eye-tracking layer can be added for measuring cognitive engagement in real time. The thesis contributes a working interface as a design artifact, empirical evidence for how frictional AI shapes the creative process, and interaction principles for GenAI tools that support rather than displace human imagination. If the outcome of your thesis allows, we will jointly publish the results in an academic design journal or conference proceedings. | more details (.pdf) |
| Outsourcing Imagination | Generative AI is often seen as a way to approach faster creative output: type a prompt, receive a solution. This raises a concern that is widely voiced but rarely measured: at some point during a GenAI conversation, creatives may quietly hand over their imagination to the AI, shifting from generating their own ideas to merely accepting the AI's, and outsourcing the effortful work of imagination without noticing (Dreyer et al., 2026; Risko & Gilbert, 2016). This thesis develops a method to detect handovers and identify their triggers. Creatives will complete a design futuring task with a GenAI tool, building on the AI-supported futuring method developed at our chair (Thoring et al., 2027), in which imagination is central to the exercise and cognitive offloading is a particular concern. The full interaction will be captured and coded turn by turn (types of prompts, types of AI responses, patterns of acceptance and rejection), building an inductive coding scheme for human-AI creative exchange. Eye-tracking is layered onto this analysis to detect imaginative disengagement in real time (Aruon et al., 2025): pupil dilation as an index of mental effort, fixation and blink patterns as markers of active engagement versus passive scanning (Kiefer et al., 2017). By aligning the coded interaction with the physiological signal, the thesis identifies which patterns of AI interaction coincide with drops in imaginative engagement, producing not only evidence that the handover occurs but a mechanistic account of what precedes it. The contribution is twofold: a coding scheme for human-AI creative interaction, and empirical evidence for the interaction patterns that trigger imaginative disengagement. If the outcome of your thesis allows, we will jointly publish the results in an academic design journal or conference proceedings. | more details (.pdf) |
| A Room for Flow | For this Master thesis, you will engage with scientific literature about deep work (Newport, 2016), flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990), and neuroaesthetics (Skov & Nadal, 2024). Based on the insights and your developed hypotheses, you will design and build an interior space that facilitates deep focus work – either as a 3D digital model, or as an analog scale model. Subsequently, you will select one particular element from your design, build it in real-size, and test and evaluate its effectiveness through qualitative and quantitative measures in our lab. Possible tools for this evaluation study are physiology and EEG measurement tools, questionnaires, and performance tasks analyses. As a result, you will develop not only a deep understanding of spatial design patterns that promote focused work, but also design an aesthetically striking interior space and a real-size, testable design intervention. If the outcome of your thesis allows, we will jointly publish the results in an academic design journal or conference proceedings. | more details (.pdf) |
| An Awe-inspiring, Sublime Workspace | For this Master thesis, you will first conduct field research in the form of a “walking tour” through pre-selected examples of sacred architecture in the Munich neighborhood. After exploring the city on your own and identifying appropriate spaces that provide a sublime and awe-inspiring atmosphere (e.g., churches, museums, libraries), you will create a tour for a group of approximately 10 participants, to experience these places under your guidance. You will measure participants’ emotional responses to these spaces through questionnaires and physiologymeasurement tools (specifically EDA). Based on the results, you will then develop hypotheses for awe-inspiring spatial characteristics and underpin them with scientific studies (Negami & Ellard, 2024) and philosophical literature (Botton, 2007, 2013; Burke, 2014). Finally, you will transfer the insights into actionable design patterns to be applied in office spaces. One particular (feasible) pattern shall be implemented in real-scale and tested in a real office environment. As a result, you will develop not only an evidence-based understanding of spatial design patterns that instigate awe but also design a real-sized, testable workspace intervention to test your hypothesis. If the outcome of your thesis allows, we will jointly publish the results in an academic design journal or conference proceedings. | more details (.pdf) |
| Tangible AI | For this master’s thesis, you will design how people can use Generative AI (GenAI) more seamlessly in their everyday work tasks. Rooted in a human-centered AI approach (Shneiderman, 2020), you will explore a range of GenAI tools and delve into human-AI interaction and AI agent research. Based on that, you will develop concepts and prototypes showcasing novel human-GenAI interaction methods. Existing examples that can serve as a reference are physical interfaces for using GenAI (MIT Design Intelligence Lab, 2023), personal AI assistants like Rabbit r1 (Rabbit Inc., 2025), and embodiments of GenAI (LOOI Robot, 2025). You will design and build the medium – a GenAI-embodied product. Optionally, you can evaluate the effectiveness and user experience of the developed design to ensure they address the user's needs. Along the way, you will gain in-depth insights into how GenAI is reshaping our workflows while also creating more seamless and intuitive human-AI interaction for the future. In doing so, this thesis will extend GenAI theory and practice. If the outcome of your thesis allows, we will jointly publish the results in an academic design journal or conference proceedings. | more details (.pdf) |