If you would like to join the seminar, please contact the local administrator at your university before the official start date. Before joining a team, please complete the pre-work listed below and present your results at the admission block course.
You can join any of the projects listed on the Projects page.
Before joining a project team, work through the Cybernetic Alchemy: From Paracelsus to Plant Sensors manuscript to familiarise yourself with the concepts, tools, and research questions of the seminar. Then complete the pre-work below.
Complete all six steps before April 15. Steps 1–6 take roughly 60–90 minutes in total.
Read Cybernetic Alchemy: From Paracelsus to Plant Sensors. Then sign up for one chapter in the shared Google Sheet. Teams are two students; some chapters require three (flagged in the sheet). Sign-up is first come, first served.
Your team will present and lead discussion on your chapter during the block course. You are the resident experts on it for the duration of the seminar.
Export any WhatsApp group chat in which you are genuinely active (at least several weeks of messages):
- Open WhatsApp → open the group → ⋮ Menu → More → Export chat (without media)
- Upload the .txt file to the Symbiont Analyzer app (iOS / Android) or the web version at socialcompass.ai
Your result: a combination of the of five collaboration archetypes — Bee (coordinator), Ant (executor), Butterfly (networker), Capybara (harmoniser), Leech (free-rider) — plus the word patterns that determined it.
Note your archetype and the top three word patterns. Come prepared to say whether the result fits you, and why.
Using the same WhatsApp export (or a different group chat) and follow the same steps as above:
Your result: your communication role in the network, your average response latency, a network graph, and your FFI profiles. Save a screenshot of the graph.
No upload required. The app runs entirely on your smartphone:
- Open Perceptiface on your phone
- The app plays a short video on screen while your front camera records your facial expressions in real time
- The ML model returns your dominant emotion and a predicted Big Five (FFI) personality profile based on your micro-expressions — signals you are not consciously producing
Note your dominant emotion, your FFI result, and one thing that surprised you about the output.
No self-report questionnaire. Your personality is inferred from your choices:
- Open the Beecome app on your phone
- Read a multi-step story that unfolds across several scenes
- At each decision point, swipe left or right to choose what the character does
- The ML model analyses your swiping pattern and returns your FFI personality profile
Compare your Beecome FFI result with your Perceptiface FFI result. Where do the two models agree? Where do they diverge?
Enter all four tool results in the Student Profiles tab of the shared Google Sheet before April 15. Your profile is your personal dataset for the entire course — you will reference it live during your team's presentation.
Each team presents their chapter in a 30-minute slot structured as follows:
15 minutes — Presentation
Present the core *argument* of your chapter — not a summary. Identify the single most important claim, the strongest evidence for it, and where it connects to the seminar's central themes: honest signals, swarm creativity, and the alchemical stages of transformation.
If your chapter contains empirical work (especially Chapters 10–16), at least one slide must engage with the method or data, not just the narrative.
15 minutes — Discussion facilitation
Immediately after your presentation, you lead the room. Prepare exactly **three discussion questions** and include them on your final slide or a handout:
- Question 1 — Clarify: Something genuinely ambiguous in the chapter that the class needs to resolve together.
- Question 2 — Challenge: A claim in the chapter you find weak or under-supported. Push back.
- Question 3 — Connect: A link to something outside the book — a current event, a tool result, a team dynamic you have experienced yourself.
Tool integration (embedded in your presentation)
Your team does not just report on the chapter — you use your own SocialCompass results as live evidence. Each chapter is paired with one or two specific tools (see the Session Planner tab of the sign-up sheet). The structure is always the same:
> "Here is what the tool said about us. Here is what the chapter predicts it should say. Here is where they disagree — and that disagreement is our discussion question."
The specific prompt for your chapter's tool is listed in the sign-up sheet.
zoom info session April 8, 2026, 3pm CET.
Block course (on site for Cologne, Raum 6.224 Bernhard-Feilchenfeld-Straße 9, virtual by zoom for Bamberg and HSLU students)
April 15, 2026, 10 am to 5 pm CET (Bamberg, Cologne, HSLU)
April 16, 2026, 10 am to 3pm CET (Bamberg, Cologne, HSLU)
Virtual status meetings are roughly bi/tri-weekly, Thursdays 14-16:00 CET
April 16, virtual status #1 will happen 2 to 3pm as part of block course day #2
April 30, virtual status #2
May 21, virtual status #3, virtual mirror
June 11, virtual status #4
June 25, virtual status #5
July 9, virtual status #6
July 23, Final Presentation
Final paper due: July 31, 2026, 23:59