A community of experts and novices, passionate for learning, networking and quality time. Interaction Design is common ground for design sectors focussing on Services, Strategy, User Experience, Product, and many more. As a part of the Interaction Design Association (IxDA), we are fostering exchange amongst designers in Berlin, since 2008.

[Un]design the un/defined

Grüezi, Sali and Hoi, dear Berlin design community,

Curious to peek at what happened at the industry event of the year? Eager to hear from and discuss with experienced community members? We'll give you VIP access to the stages of Interaction 23, going down in Zürich all of this week, and we'll come to you full of insights and takeaways after a week of profound thoughts on interaction design.

At our 82nd event, we are thrilled to present five speakers giving four original Interaction23 sessions: Hertje Brodersen, Tiia Leppänen, Samuel Huber, Sandra Griffel-Ripperger and Susanne Junglas. Discussing designer's purpose, through what we can better help developers, how prototyping should move from human- to planet-centric, and how we can demonstrate unignorable results to C-levels. See below for full session details.

Important:

  • Due to high no show rates we need to overbook our events. Means, when the venue is full we will have to turn people away. No ticket no fun, but having a general ticket is NOT a guarantee for admittance. First come, first served.
  • If you don't feel well, please play safe and join another time

After the talks, as usual, there will be room for discussion, questions and opinions. For post event drinks, we'll move over to a nice bar so feel free to join in later if you cannot make 7pm – Bar whereabouts to be posted to our #Berlin channel on the IxDA Slack.

See you there,

Jay, Audrey and Thomas

Designers Enable a Great Developer Experience

Tiia Leppänen, Lead Designer at Nordcloud

The Covid situation gave a push for the companies to create better ways to work, especially remotely. Even before the pandemic, Developer Experience started to spread in the digital industry. For developers, many common pain points, use cases, and user journeys are recognized. There are many solutions in the markets which offer tools and platforms for the developers, e.g., to improve their efficiency and productivity.

How can designers help to improve the Developer Experience?

They are the experts researching user, and developers' needs.
They are experts in drafting user journeys and recognizing pain points.
They are experts in breaking the user journey into sections and creating a smooth pass through the stages that consider different types of touchpoints.

The Designers should treat the developers as any other users in any other projects. This might be challenging as the users are very close to the challenge, and already have new solutions clearly defined in their heads. But this situation is undoubtedly where the designers are needed – to bring people's ideas together and steer the ideation towards common technical, social, and communal solutions.

Rethinking design metrics - a holistic approach to measure impact

Sandra Griffel-Ripperger, Experience Design Director
Susanne Junglas, Experience Design Director

Today, the concept of user-centered design with solution-oriented frameworks and design principles has gained traction in the industry and at the executive levels. But the challenges are becoming more complex. More and more factors are playing an increasingly important role in the decisions made about success and, more importantly, impact. If we want to create value, we have to think systemically and understand interacting, interrelated or interdependent areas holistically and in real terms and evaluate them or make them assessable. If we intend to make a tangible difference through our work as designers, we need to understand their impact on people, on business, on society and the environment in a nuanced way. Metrics play a critical, yet too underutilized role in this process. Their effective use offers the potential to clarify the role and purpose of design and produce tangible, resounding results - to which even the C-level cannot turn a blind eye.

Today, however, classic metrics are no longer sufficient for just that. The time for KPIs has passed. To make the experience, business and sustainability truly measurable, we have developed a framework within which all relevant factors are translated into clear metrics. In our session, which is an excerpt of a four hours workshop held at Interaction 23, we will show how to set up and maintain a system of metrics in different areas (experience, business and sustainability indicators) based on qualitative and quantitative data. The goal of our workshop is to build a holistic understanding and to provide tools that enable a systemic and holistic view and assessment beyond silos.

Prototyping for the Planet

Samuel Huber, Research fellow at the Zurich University of the Arts

We have become masters in human-centered design. However, our hyperfocus on creating value for humans also has its downturns.

User Journeys, user Personas, user research – our methodologies are blindfolded and optimize only one element of what is indeed a system. If we continue to focus on humans alone, we will lead this system to collapse. Hence, let's overcome our egoism and start crafting in ecosystems. Planet-centric design offers an overdue recalibration of our designerly ways of working. However, when we no longer design solely for humans but the planet, complexity increases manifold.

Therefore, this talk explores how prototyping offers a powerful way to engage with human and non-human stakeholders beyond the design discipline. Eventually, design is no longer a mere tool, but a universal language like math and music that allows diverse groups to find answers to wicked problems collectively.

What is (job) love?

Hertje Brodersen, Design Leader / Experience Strategist

The job title "Designer" carries vague promises of creativity and self-expression. It's not necessarily a job you pick because you want to get rich fast. It's a job you are drawn to because you find meaning in it. "Find something you love to do, and you'll never have to work a day in your life", the promise goes.

What does this actually mean for designers? Working as a designer can be immensely fulfilling - you get to create things of beauty and effectiveness, you help people, you reinvent the world. Yet, this idea of design as a life-long passion project rather than a job may also open the door to unrealistic expectations of work as well as unhealthy work-life balances.

The pandemic has led most of us to re-evaluate the workplace and our role in it. In this talk, Hertje will take this prompt to re-evaluate what it means to love design and to work as a designer, and how to navigate the boundaries.

About our speakers

Tiia Leppänen

Tiia Leppänen has been working as a Lead Designer at Nordcloud since Nov 2022. She has been working for a client solution to create their own DX platform. She was also working together with their DX team which is the initial community for the developers later on. Inspired by the client project, Leppänen brought this topic also to Nordcloud's consideration, and currently, they are working on it internally, but also considering ways to help their clients with the topic. She is one of the DX topic leaders at Nordcloud.

Sandra Griffel-Ripperger

As a director with a focus on strategic design at denkwerk - one of the leading digital agencies in Germany - Sandra Griffel-Ripperger accompanies companies in their digital transformation and develops ideas and concepts for innovative services and products. She has experience leading interdisciplinary teams of XD designers and analysts/researchers in developing sophisticated, insight-based solutions that align key business drivers with user needs. Her track record includes a number of strategic projects for global brands such as Condor, Motel One, TUI and Deutsche Telekom. Sandra also participates in local and international XD communities, speaks at meet-ups and conferences (UX Cambridge, Interaction 17 NYC, EuroIA 18) and writes articles and whitepapers, e.g. on contextual commerce, conversational interfaces, screenless interface development, testing methods, ….

Susanne Junglas

Susanne Junglas is a Design Director at denkwerk with 15+ years experience in different design disciplines with deep expertise in service design, design thinking, research and future & foresight. At denkwerk she is responsible for outstanding digital solutions.

Samuel Huber

Samuel Huber is on a mission to push Planet Centric Design to organizations of all kinds in his role as Strategy Director at Goodpatch, a global design firm that operates between Tokyo and Berlin. He has just completed a Ph.D. on the topic of strategizing as prototyping at the University of St. Gallen's RISE Management Innovation Lab and continues to explore the interface of research and practice.

Samuel's fascination for wicked problems and curiosity for uncertain situations have provided him with a variety of experiences: He has been a founding member of UBS Y, the future think tank of the world's biggest wealth manager, worked long nights in a New York art gallery, and focused on development economics with Biovision. Now, Huber enjoys his work in interdisciplinary teams to conceptualize and develop anything from compression stockings to circular building technology platforms.

Previously, his studies in sociology, economy, management, and design led him to the Universities of Zurich, St. Gallen, and all the way to Stanford and Keio in Tokyo.

Hertje Brodersen

As a UX Designer, Experience Strategist and Design Leader with 15+ years of experience, Hertje Brodersen worked for a variety of companies and industries, from small design studios to large organizations, from automotive to fashion, and currently is a Head of Design at Zalando. She focuses on planning and creating experiences with a lasting impact, both for the people she designs for, and the folks she works with. Hertje's background is in literary sciences and cultural anthropology. Not the typical start for a career in UX, but it helped shape a creative and analytical mind that likes complex problems that can't be shoe-horned in a simple sitemap or a user journey.

Fundamentals & Perspectives (IxDD 2022)

Dear Berlin Design Community,

This year’s World Interaction Design Day (#IxDD) goes back to it’s original format of local events with a joint, global outreach. Join us in celebrating IxDD 2022 with two extraordinary talks on the fundamentals and future perspectives of design.

We’ll meet at HERE Technologies to hear from Sarmishta Pantham about the relationships of colour and desire along the most foundational yet complex experience of the senses: eating. And Professor Mike Richter will discuss how a future generation of designers can become part of the global solution, rather than the problem.

And there will be plenty of room for questions and time to drink, eat and mingle on HERE’s sunny rooftop terrace!

Important:

  • Due to high no show rates we need to overbook our events. Means, when the venue is full we will have to turn people away. No ticket no fun, but having a ticket is NOT a guarantee for admittance. First come, first served.
  • Verifiable full vaccination certificate required (please present your QR code)
  • Masks required indoors
  • If you don't feel well, please play safe and join another time

See you at IxDD 2022!

Thomas, Jay, Audrey and Kathryn

Which came first: The taste or the colour?

Sarmishta Pantham, User Experience Designer & Art Director

The old aphorism ascribed to the first-century Roman gourmand Apicius, "We eat first with our eyes", has never felt more accurate. In today’s social media-driven, highly visual world, food is often reduced to its visual appearance – and its colour consumes us much more than we give it thought. Call it branding, experience or simply association, our relationship with colour in food has been steadily engineered and conditioned to visceral perfection over the decades. Even so, it is constantly in flux, shaped and influenced by individuals and their histories– with the technology of the time aiding the creation of our expectations. Sarmishta will explore the ping-pong between colour and desire in the most fundamental yet complex experience of the senses: eating.

The Future of Design Education

Mike Richter, Professor and Dean Faculty of Design at University of Applied Sciences Darmstadt, Founding Partner of icon group

Some might say that designers and the practice of design are part of the problem of over-consumption and over-production, of wastefulness and consumerism. And even if that is right, doesn’t it just mean that we need to train the next cohort of designers in different, better ways, equip them with the right tools, to become part of the solution? In this talk Mike pulls from his long experience in teaching and practicing design and recent exchange with thought leaders like Don Norman and Dieter Rams, and discusses how to establish design education for a (hopefully) better future.

About our speakers

Sarmishta Pantham

Sarmishta Pantham is a user experience designer, art director and consultant collaborating with companies to uncover strategic opportunities and shape them into purposeful experiences. Over the last 18 years, Sarmishta has worked in fashion, brand strategy, trend research and user experience design for brands like Levi’s, eBay, Blinkist, and Marley Spoon, in India, the United States and Germany.

Backed with multidisciplinary experience, her work bridges purpose, culture and experience, seeking whatever object, environment, or experience most effectively and appropriately addresses the audience.

Alongside her practice, Sarmishta runs a parallel practice of interdisciplinary experiments between visual language, culture and food through writing, photography and community– including a pop-up dinner series serving up traditional Indian delicacies, called "Indian Standard Time".

Mike Richter

Mike Richter, born 1970 in Ulm, designer and entrepreneur. Studied industrial design in Schwäbisch Gmünd, London and Copenhagen. Diploma in 1995. Fulbright scholarship to study at the Institute of Design (New Bauhaus) in Chicago, masters degree 1997.

Professional activities in industrial companies and management consultancies. Member of the management of MetaDesign until 2002, co-founded iconmobile (today icon group) in 2003. Start-ups and investments in areas such as internet of things, artificial intelligence, data analytics and eGaming.

Lectureships in Dessau, Ivrea and Darmstadt. Professor for design and media system design at the Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences since 2002. Focal points in teaching: UX, digitalization, business design and entrepreneurial design.

President of the German Design Council, member of the jury for the German Design Award and the German Brand Award and member of the University Council of the Media Design University in Berlin.

Summer BBQ feat. Peter Merholz

Dear Berlin Design Community,

It’s the time of year to fire up the barbecue and have a chat with drinks in hands, and 💥 IxDA Berlin is back with a bang! 💥 Join us outdoors on diffferent’s stunning roof top, to celebrate our 80st event after discussing indoors with our very special guest, 🎤 Peter Merholz.

Important:

  • Due to high no show rates we need to overbook our events. Means, when the venue is full we will have to turn people away. No ticket no fun, but having a ticket is NOT a guarantee for admittance. First come, first served.
  • Verifiable full vaccination certificate required (please present your QR code)
  • Masks required indoors
  • If you don't feel well, please play safe and join another time
  • Peter’s talk indoors, party outdoors. If you prefer to stay outdoors that’s fine – we’ll broadcast video and audio to a smaller overflow room with an open front and balcony
  • Main access is through an elevator, you can opt for the staircase, and there's staircases between floors, so this unfortunately is not an accessible venue

We’re looking forward to seeing everyone in person again!

Thomas, Jay, Audrey and Kathryn

The Experience is the Product

Peter Merholz, Design executive and organizational consultant

Something that has always been true of products is that people buy them for the experience they deliver. Yet, at some point in the history of digital product development, the practices of user experience and product management diverged. In this talk, Peter will make a case for re-integrating these practices, showing how dual-track agile is essentially the "double diamond" and the implications to product and design orgs when you accept that everything is now a service.

About our speakers

Peter Merholz

Peter has worked at the intersection of design, technology, and humans for over 25 years. He co-founded Adaptive Path, the premier user experience consultancy, acquired by Capital One in 2014.

Since leaving Adaptive Path, he’s worked as a design leader and executive, leading teams at Groupon, OpenTable, Jawbone, Capital One, Snagajob (now Snag), and Kaiser Permanente. Peter has long been a contributor to the professional design community, through his writing, conference speaking, and events hosting.

In 2016 he co-wrote "Org Design for Design Orgs", still the premier book on building in-house design teams.

UXmas 2020

Merry Christmas to you dear IxDAb’ties,

As we wrap ourselves in winter jackets and huddle around the heater, we’re sure you’re just as glad as us that the end of year is near. So please come and join us in Christmas cheer as we clink our glasses and say goodbye to 2020, in style.

If you expected us to take over an iconic Berlin techno club as it would be our typical character, well… UXmas will be different from years gone by, as we will celebrate together virtually. But this isn’t going to be just another video call. And we’re not going to accept any cutdown on fun, food and alcohol! :)

We’d like to invite you to a virtual night to remember, where we will cook a dish together, meet new friends, and say hello to some old faces. If you haven’t been to an IxDA Berlin event, this is a great first one, as everyone will be on camera and microphone. We’ll be creating smaller groups and go round robin, so that everyone can get to know each other, and you too, are warmly invited.

Important information such as what to bring and prepare on your own, or the link to the event, will be shared well in time on the Eventbrite page.

Can’t wait to see you for UXmas,

Have a Merry Christmas,

Kathryn, Jay, Audrey and Thomas

Go to the list of most current events

New Normal of: Events

Dear IxDAb’ties,

The pandemic has changed how we come together for events, if that is to enjoy the arts, for conferences, or to protest. While whole industries have been turned upside down, important parts of humanities’ togetherness have come to a halt, or happen in very different ways.

With the "New Normal of: Events" we’re trying out a new format. We have invited three representatives to briefly introduce you to the most pressing limits to events, from their perspectives. We’ll then jump into three respective ideation jams, to discuss how we might break through those barriers, to spark fresh ideas how to make most out of that "new normal", and perhaps we can even start some great relationships.

We’re looking forward to doing some groovy remote brainstorming alongside you. Hey and as always, there will be plenty of time for meeting old friends and new!

See you there!

Jay, Audrey, Thomas and Kathryn

Protests: Connecting digital and social change

Line Niedeggen, Activist and Student
Leonie Baumgarten-Egemole, Activist and Student

Through organising Black Lives Matter and Climate Justice protests online and offline, Line and Leonie work to spread awareness about the importance of an intersectional view on those global justice crises.

Finding creative online solutions to carry out their activities has become extremely important throughout the last months. But how can we manage long term activity? Working together with you, Leonie and Line aim to uncover how intersectional digital, global protest can bring justice for everyone.

Arts: An industry in transition – digital projects and live-concerts in times of Corona at Konzerthaus Berlin

Laura Zenziper, Digital Projects and Communication at Konzerthaus Berlin

New forms of communication and content, flexibility, quick response to current hygiene concepts and the expansion in the digital space – Corona leads the classical event industry to new ways of communication and projects to reach their target audience.
Presenting the digital projects of the Konzerthaus Berlin and their communication series #konzertZUhaus during the first lockdown, which was awarded the German Online Communication Award 2020, together with you, Laura seeks to explore current challenges and additional opportunities for the industry.

Conferencing: Remote events are terrible – let’s #FixRemoteEvents

Fredrik Matheson, Designer at Bekk
Andre Jay Meissner, Co-organizer of IxDA Berlin

The pandemic has upended – perhaps permanently – how people come together to conference. Meetups, Camps, Salons, Conferences and just hanging out has been replaced by video meetings. Many of us have worked hard to fit their doings into good online events. Organizers have replaced stages with software, speakers are talking into cameras and attendees are staring into screens. But: None of the platforms and formats out there offer anything even close to the energy and intimacy of a great physical gathering. We need to change course.

Instead of repetitively wasting resources to make the most of the platforms on offer, event organizers and speakers need to pull together as a community to truly leverage "virtual" and to demand a new kind of platform for virtual events.

Before joining this session, watch Jay and Fredrik at recent World Interaction Design Day discuss what we’ve lost, why existing tech and formats are a poor replacement, and what we can do – together with you – to change from a navel-gazing event culture into sustainably shaping a new level of conferencing.

About our speakers

Line Niedeggen

Line Niedeggen studies and has been co-organizing demonstrations with Fridays for Future Heidelberg as well as national campaigns for over 1.5 years now. Together with Leonie Baumgarten-Egemole she has organized protests combining the fights for racial justice and climate justice.

Leonie Baumgarten-Egemole

Leonie Baumgarten-Egemole also studies and is working in various anti-racism organizations in Heidelberg, whilst being committed to a discrimination-free society. Because how could they concentrate on their studies if they are confronted with the social and global injustices in our society on a daily basis?

Laura Zenziper

Laura Zenziper is a cultural manager, musicologist and theater scholar from Berlin. Her work focuses on project management, strategic orientation of cultural projects and development of new (technical) approaches to mediation and communication. She works for various ensembles, a classic festival and recently started to coordinate the "Virtual Konzerthaus" at Konzerthaus Berlin.

Fredrik Matheson

Fredrik works at Bekk in Oslo, Norway, and has helped run IxDA Oslo since 2005, producing 150+ events. When IxDA Oslo began livestreaming their events in 2016, they quickly found out that events that were great to attend in-person were quite terrible to attend remotely. They have been working on better setups ever since. Fredrik now works to #FixRemoteEvents.

Andre Jay Meissner

Jay is a Metalhead currently at Adobe. Passionate for HMI since 1989, he is working on Adobe XD since 2014, and has helped to organise conferences for 600 people, this very community IxDA Berlin, as well as countless meetups. He’s a former sound engineer and producer, frequent keynote speaker at international events, a conference aficionado and -sponsor. Woodworker. DIR diver. Co-founder of World Interaction Design Day (#IxDD). Now working to #FixRemoteEvents.

Go to the list of most current events

Beyond the West - A Conversation with Payal Arora

Dear IxDAb’ties,

Although the last months have taught us to physically distance as much as we can to stay safe, we still believe that in our minds and hearts this world has to come closer together. The the more we know, the better we understand each other, the better we can work things out.

At our (virtual) event #77 we’d like to look beyond the west and shed light on the world’s next billion users.

We warmly welcome Payal Arora; an award winning and international accomplished scholar and author of the “The Next Billion Users", to IxDA Berlin. She comes to us live from her home in Amsterdam and will talk about her research on internet usage and internet services in emerging markets and places with different demographics, rules and histories perhaps, to our own.

We’ll engage in a fireside chat with Payal which will also include questions from our audience. Afterwards, we’ll jump into breakout sessions where we can all can discuss the future of our internet together.

Some of Payal’s thought can be viewed here:

Two more resources:

More than usual, this event requires your active participation upfront. We need your input and the questions you like to be addressed. If you haven't done so yet, please take five minutes to complete this survey well ahead of the event.

This event starts after work at 6:30 pm Berlin time and we'll leave the first half hour plus ample time at the end open for networking and connecting.

Yours from Berlin,

Thomas, Audrey, Kathryn and Jay

The Next Billion Users

Payal Arora, Digital Anthropologist and Author

We are immersed in a graveyard of apps. We seem to be producing more of the same. As these products have gone global, we appear to mistake scalability for adoptability. Part of the failure of Facebook Zero and Secret for instance, rested on predictive fictions on what motivates users from the global south. Those long at the margins of our imagination have now become the norm – the next billion - and are pushing ahead with novel demands on interfacing, design preferences, and aspirational consumption, demanding in turn that we rethink what we deem as rational, efficient, effective, and thereby good design for the next billion.

About our speakers

Payal Arora

Payal Arora is a digital anthropologist and author of the award-winning book “The Next Billion Users" with Harvard Press. Her expertise lies in digital experience and user values among low-income communities worldwide and comes with more than a decade of fieldwork experience in such contexts. Forbes named her the “next billion champion" and the right kind of person to reform tech. Several international media outlets have covered her work including the BBC, The Economist, Quartz, Tech Crunch, The Boston Globe, F.A.Z, The Nation and CBC. She has consulted on tech innovation for diverse organizations such as UNESCO, KPMG, GE, and HP and has given about 200 talks in 52 countries including a TEDx talk on the future of the internet. She is a Professor and Chair in Technology, Values, and Global Media Cultures at Erasmus University Rotterdam, Founder of Catalyst Lab, a digital storytelling organization and Co-PI for the Feminist Approaches to Labour Collectives (FemLab.Co) initiative. She is Indian and American and currently lives in Amsterdam.

Go to the list of most current events

The Tough Nuts in Remote Design

Dear Design Community Worldwide,

While some design teams have practiced remote design for a long time, the majority of us only recently had to face the challenge of working remotely in their teams, alongside users, and their clients.

Albeit the level of adoption to designing remotely varies wildly on a global scale, many best practices have been developed and shared within our community, and for the most part, we’ve more or less adjusted our work behaviour to the demands of this new world.

Yet we have discovered tasks that feel close to impossible to conduct in a virtual work environment. At our next event, we’d like to fill in those blank spots, and we’re inviting Ashley Lukasik, Jim Kalbach, Ana Domb, Marie Gosal and Hany Rizk to share with us some of their most recent challenges in short inspirational talks, and to lead our collective brain to identify solutions for some of the toughest nuts in remote design in subsequent breakout sessions.

Join the global design community online on April 29th from 4pm CEST (Berlin time) to improve remote design beyond the obvious pain points. All workshop results will be documented and shared publicly afterwards.

More than usual, this event requires your active participation for it to work. We need your input to help us prioritize the problems we want to tackle as a group. If you haven't done so yet, please take five minutes to complete this survey well ahead of the event.

Once again: this event starts at 4pm Berlin time, so please block the time in your calendar now. Just bring your whole team and manager along with you.

We’re looking forward to doing some groovy remote brainstorming alongside you!

Yours,

Audrey, Jay, Kathryn and Thomas

Rethinking Immersive Experiences

Ashley Lukasik, Founder at Murmur Ring

In this lightning talk, Ashley will discuss how to rethink immersive experiences digitally and share insight from a current experiment in remote research during the pandemic. Participants in the breakout session will have an opportunity to delve more deeply into how we can use the current context to rethink and add to core tenets of human-centered design.

Engagement in Remote Collaboration

Jim Kalbach, Head of Customer Experience at MURAL

Remote work is not new, but effective collaboration in distributed teams has never been more relevant than right now in these challenging times. This talk focuses on key techniques facilitators of remote sessions can use to keep participants engaged and improve efficiency.

Participatory Design From Afar

Ana Domb, Consultant in UX Research and Strategy, IxDA Board of Directors

How do we create inclusive and participatory design processes in a time of social isolation? What approaches will allow us to include those who are still on the other side of the digital divide? I'll share what I'm learning as I try to navigate these challenges with all the optimism I can muster.

Design Critiques From a Distance

Marie Gosal, Design Director at MetaLab

Running remote design critiques is no easy feat. How do you create the right amount of structure needed to ritualize critique, yet allow for the flexibility needed across timezones, team sizes, and seemingly impossible calendar Tetris? This talk will cover techniques and experiments to try with your team whether your newly remote, semi-remote, or fully distributed.

HMW keep remote workshops engaging?

Hany Rizk, Founder and Design Sprint Facilitator at No BS Innovation Studio

One of the most common concerns about remote workshops is keeping participants engaged. While facilitators of in-person workshops could read the room and sense the participants' concerns or motivations, they now have to discover new dynamics for remote workshops. In this session, we will work on better understanding what affects participant engagement, and think of ideas for new approaches, methods, and techniques that could be applied to keep remote workshops engaging.

About our speakers

Ashley Lukasik

Ashley Lukasik’s passion is creating the conditions for collective creativity. Founder of Murmur Ring, she curates powerful experiences to help organizations accomplish their strategic aims through immersive encounters, collective discourse, and storytelling. After completing her M.A. in Anthropology at the University of Chicago and running a startup company that licensed UofC medical technology, Ashley spent eight years overseeing partnerships and communications at the visionary design school, IIT Institute of Design. There, she helped organizations use human-centered design to respond to complex challenges for which they did not have a preexisting roadmap, and launched The New Bauhaus feature documentary, which she co-produced.

Jim Kalbach

Jim Kalbach is a noted author, speaker, and instructor in design, customer experience, and strategy. He is currently Head of Customer Experience at MURAL, the leading online whiteboard. Jim has worked with large companies, such as eBay, Audi, Sony, Elsevier Science, Lexis Nexis, and Citrix.

In 2007 Jim published his first full-length book, Designing Web Navigation (O’Reilly, 2007). His second book, Mapping Experiences (O’Reilly, 2016), focuses on the role of visualizations in strategy and innovation. He blogs at experiencinginformation.com and tweets under @jimkalbach.

Ana Domb

Ana Domb Krauskopf is an independent design researcher and strategist. She founded and directed the Interaction Design School at Veritas University in Costa Rica, the first IxD graduate program in Central America. She currently teaches at Lead University. Ana is a director for IxDA’s global Board of Directors and for the Costa Rican Museum of Contemporary Art and Design. Previously she was the Director of Brand Innovation at Almabrands in Chile. In the US, she worked at THE MEME, a design consultancy based out of Cambridge, MA.

Ana holds a Master's degree in Comparative Media Studies from MIT, where she was part of the Convergence Culture Consortium under the direction of Henry Jenkins.

In past lives, she’s worked as a journalist, filmmaker and music producer. She has consulted with Turner Broadcasting, Comcast, BAC-Credomatic, Mesoamérica, HIVOS, UICN, amongst others. Ana tweets under @anadk.

Marie Gosal

Marie Gosal is a Design Director at MetaLab. She has over ten years of experience leading creative teams, both at agencies and in-house. At MetaLab, her role has her guiding teams to solve complex product design problems across an array of industries. You can count on her for asking thoughtful questions, seeking unforgettable design solutions, and sharing obscure trivia knowledge. Marie tweets under @mariegosal.

Hany Rizk

Hany Rizk is a UX & Product Strategist based in Berlin, running No BS, an innovation studio that helps companies solve real challenges, create meaningful solutions, and deliver mindful experiences. For over 10 years he has designed and led in-house products and services for large corporations such as Volkswagen, and various startups — including his own Somuchmore that was later acquired. Hany mentors startups and gives talks on UX, Product, and Innovation. He tweets under @hanyrizk_.

Go to the list of most current events

A New Dawn

Dear IxDAb’ties,

Unwrap yourselves Berlin, and get ready to come out of hibernation. We are back from Interaction 20 in Milan and are reporting back on all the conference highlights. Together with fellow Berliners who went to Milan along with us to co-organize, volunteer or attend, we are preparing a best-of from this year's conference for you, and we will be hearing two Interaction 20 talks from locals Juli Sikorska and Júlia Racskó who spoke at the event.

As physical meetings recently seem to have become unpopular, this event is going to happen on a virtual platform. We're working at full steam to create an immersive evening online, including:

  • Face to face networking with old friends and complete strangers,
  • listening to our speakers and discussing with the group,
  • contributing with your own short messages in our "open mic" section,
…and some IxDA Berlin quality time out as usual!

Join us for a fun filled evening,

Jay, Audrey, Kathryn and Thomas

Apocalypse!!!1! How not to be an idiot designing climate futures

Juli Sikorska, Service & Experience Designer

From science fiction to climate fiction: imagining possible climate futures we can live in

Most world leaders have committed to the Paris Agreement to keep the global temperature rise under 2°C above pre-industrial levels. We expect our leaders to understand and counteract the effects the climate crisis will have on our everyday lives, but do we truly understand what it means for us?

This talk will explain more about why we need to re-work our relationship with climate change and how speculative design can help us see the many possible futures and design for the ones we want.

Attentive Design – A quest for a sustainable model of attention

Júlia Racskó, Interaction Designer

If we stopped tracking our attention as time spent, and start treating it as a living connection between us and the outside world, could we create a mentally sustainable digital media environment?
\Would you measure how much you enjoyed going to the beach by the minutes you were in the water? Would you strive to maximize the time spent in the water? No?

Then why do we think using time spent as a success metric is an appropriate way to track attention online? The evidence is there: optimizing for it damages our mental and emotional well-being.

So I did what I usually do when I’m down: I started to draw. Which helped me understand what other aspects of our attentional capacities matter. My talk will introduce a new, visual model to observe, record and show how we focus. Using it hopefully will bring more flow into all of our lives.

About our speakers

Juli Sikorska

Juli is a researcher and designer interested in making people feel the intangible. On a quest to understand what complex issues like the climate crisis will mean for us, she takes cues from creative fields like product and critical design to identify needs and generate empathy within systemic problems. Juli enjoys creating products, services and stories to envision and immerse ourselves in alternative futures.

In the product design world, Juli has led an ethnographic research project on clean energy, worked on an open innovation platform at the MIT Climate CoLab, and strategic design projects in investments and telecommunications. Her more creative work has led her from music journalism, to turning citizens’ feedback to the German Chancellery into visual stories, to designing out noise in cities. Juli's work has been exhibited at the Design Museum (UK) and South London Gallery (UK).

Juli studied human-computer-interaction and environmental studies at LMU and MIT and graduated from the CDTM entrepreneurship program.

Júlia Racskó

Júlia is a Berlin-based interaction designer who never stops drawing. She is particularly interested in preserving a varied emotional landscape in our design processes and to fit our models and frameworks to our lived experience and not the other way around. The topic of Júlia’s talk stems from her master’s research built on connecting various ideas from the fields of philosophy, psychology and design, as well as deep interviews with practicing designers.

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UXmas 2019

Dear IxDAb’ties,

Ten years counting, IxDA is pulling together Berlin’s Design Communities to celebrate the year at the (in)famous UXmas. And this year is no different! Together with Service Design Berlin, UXcamp Europe, Design Lab, Jam Berlin and UX Bookclub Berlin, we’re inviting you to the most epic of all holiday parties for 2019.

Throw on your reindeer antlers, leave your computer at home and let your hair down, because we’ll be mingling for the season’s last hurrah! UXmas is cruising top iconic clubs and this year we’ll be at Fiese Remise. The DJs will be stunning, the party will be free (until the budget is out), and all this is only possible thanks to our awesome sponsors:

Blinkist, SumUp, Signavio, HERE, Futurice, TestingTime, FRIDAY and Cromatics

Hey, even Secret Santa is coming again this year and he needs a gift from you to make it work! Bring along a present and Santa will swap from one in his sack of goodies! Perhaps a great book you'd like to pass on, cookies & candy (homemade even?), or anything else for less than €5 you'd be happy to receive yourself…

See you at UXmas 2019!

Thomas, Audrey, Jay and Kathryn,
together with our friends at Service Design Berlin, UXcamp Europe, Design Lab, Jam Berlin and UX Bookclub Berlin

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New Beginnings

Dear IxDAb’ties,

Do you remember the last time you joined a new team, dipped into new product? Have you felt chasing to catch up with where the team is going while trying to understand where they’re coming from? While working on understanding why certain questions are being asked and why they are important, you wanted to structure your efforts, and arrange involvement with stakeholders and end users around you to do your work effectively.

At our next event Jen Goertzen talks about how to hit the ground running when joining new teams and Dave Hora, someone who has been a ‘first researcher on the team’ six times over, looks into making design research not only accurate, but truly effective.

If you aren’t able to make it at 7pm, please join us as usual, for some responsible post-event drinking at Wendel Bar, Schlesische Straße 42 , 10997 Berlin. No registration required for the bar, but here's a map.

To quote John Heywood: “A hard beginning maketh a good ending”,

Kathryn, Jay, Thomas, and Audrey

Shaping Effective Research

Dave Hora, Sr. User Researcher, ResearchGate

We face problems in our day-to-day work that we don't have all the necessary information to solve. In addressing those problems, we can guess, estimate, experiment, or even try to "fail fast" our way to success (good luck to you brave souls who choose this). But, especially where users are concerned, we can also choose understand what we're trying to accomplish, identify where the risks & gaps are, and develop our high priority questions for the work at hand. This is what we need to shape effective research. In this talk, we'll cover:

  • the idea of research as it applies to user experience / interaction work,
  • the unusual nature of the User / UX Researcher specialist role,
  • the type of questions we ask & evidence we gather in user research,
  • how to use that to make the work work.
It's a mostly-practical and slightly theoretical look at research and the mindset that can turn interesting human data into successful products and services.

Joining and knowing your new team: How to onboard yourself

Jen Goertzen, Sr. Product Designer, IDAGIO

Do you remember the last time you joined a new team? Most of us feel pressured to hit the ground running. But instead, we find ourselves chasing to catch up with where the team is going while trying to understand where they’re coming from. It’s a recipe for imposter syndrome. Jen, a UX designer with almost 10 years of experience working in-house and as a consultant on product and service teams, will share the challenges we face when we join a new team, and a framework she’s created over time to help build trust while better understanding the product, processes, and people in your new environment.

About our speakers

Dave Hora

Dave is a researcher fascinated by how teams and companies work together... or don't. He spent 9 years building the research function at startups and a consultancy in San Francisco, then a year consulting independently as Dave's Research Company in Denver, Colorado. His focus is on how we identify impactful work, structure our efforts, and arrange involvement with the people around us to be effective teammates. Dave recently moved to Berlin and is excited to share his perspective with and learn from the community here.

Jen Goertzen

Jen Goertzen is a UX designer and researcher from Canada, working in Berlin. She co-founded Caribou, a UX consultancy, in 2011. Over the course of her career, she has consulted with and worked in-house on teams at startups and organizations across a range of industries, from interactive retail experiences, secure messaging for workplace collaboration, and most recently, a music platform for classical music. In all experiences, she finds space for questions, discussion, and design.

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Trust & Responsibility

Dear IxDAb’ties,

On September 24, for the second edition of World Interaction Design Day (#IxDD), we come together as a global community to show how interaction design improves the human condition. With around 100 events scheduled across the globe, Berlin is not going to miss this. We have two talks and a hardcore lively discussion up our sleeve around this year’s global theme Trust & Responsibility.

Gabi Ivens, open source investigator and former Mozilla fellow will investigate how deepfakes are impacting our work and living today and in the future, and Oscar Garcia from Verimi will be talking about the relation of visual language and the perception of trust.

If you aren’t able to make it at 7pm, please join us as usual, for some responsible post-event drinking at Michelberger, Warschauer Str. 39–40, 10243 Berlin. No registration required here, and there's a map.

Trust us!! Thomas, Jay, Audrey and Kathryn

Deepfakes

Gabi Ivens

Over the last three years, the word ‘deepfakes’ went from being a username on Reddit to having the perceived potential to launch missiles and crash companies. If seeing is no longer believing, how will you know what can you trust and who will help you decide? During this talk Gabi will introduce this technology, how it developed, challenges with the solutions being proposed and how to mainstream media-forensics techniques.

The relation of visual language and the perception of trust

Oscar Garcia

Can the perception of security be breached or reinforced through design? Is it possible for a visual language to impact on users behaviour? Let's discuss how cognition affects these factors.

About our speakers

Gabi Ivens

Gabi works as an open source investigator. She locates, analyses, and preserves publicly available information to use in human rights investigations and researchers the ethical and social implications, as well as the technical challenges, of this work.

Gabi is a former Ford-Mozilla Fellow hosted at WITNESS where she researched the upcoming challenges concerning authenticity of images, videos, and audio recordings. Previously, Gabi led the investigative portal Exposing the Invisible, at the NGO Tactical Technology Collective.

Oscar Garcia

Oscar is a graphic designer form Mexico City, who graduated in 2018 as a Master in Strategic Business Management at the University of Law (UK), at GISMA Business School, Berlin Campus. So far he founded four startups, three of them still operate.

The last seven years of his career Oscar focused on UI, UX and product development. In the meantime he crafted a methodology to optimise the UI and UX design process as a system. Using data analysis tools and visual communication techniques applied to user interfaces, he has been able to focus team efforts to reach very ambitious objectives.

Oscar’s passion is to help products grow through a business driven design experience.

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Design for Deep Engagement

Dear IxDAb’ties,

Stickiness, or an active user base, is difficult to achieve. Compare to the following objective:The user adopts the same end goal as us and subscribes to our mission.What a daunting challenge!

At an intuitive level, we just know that if something is engaging, it will have a greater chance of success. But what do we mean when we say "we want to get our users engaged"? A series of interactions can be evidence of engagement, sure, but they by themselves are not a psychological state of togetherness. Can we specify the context that this psychological state of engagement is happening within?

On June 4, we are thrilled to be joined by the master of engagement, Scott Gould, to help us identify the six psychological levels of engagement, and teach us how to consider them at relevant stages of the user journey, and optimise for them.

From a practical perspective, we might wonder what kind of methods are required to generate long lasting deep engagement while creating a welcoming environment for new engagement. And we're stoked to announce that Hanna Petruschat from Wikimedia Germany is going to discuss those questions together with Scott and us along the case of Wikipedia and Wikidata.

Yours engagingly,
Jay, Audrey, Kathryn and Thomas

Made to Engage: how to design for deep engagement

Scott Gould, Author, "The Shape of Engagement"

Engagement is the big buzz word today: the apps that do it are winning with it, thought leaders are telling us we should do it, customer behaviour shows us they want it, and the brands that do it benefit from it. Even the research tells us that engagement correlates to 350% outperformance against the norm.

But just what on earth is engagement? Is it just a "like" on Facebook? Or is it more like advocacy, loyalty and adoption? Or, might there even be a more profound truth behind the engagement puzzle?

This interactive and highly engaging session will give you the answers! Drawing on the history of humanity, and going from religion to brands to romance, this talk will reveal the process behind engagement, and also empower you with the five universal principles that can spur anyone to engage anywhere, anytime, with anything!

Designing with not for - an observational report on the Wikimedia Movement

Hanna Petruschat, UX & Interaction Designer at Wikimedia Germany

In a world of constant change and distraction it's hard to keep people engaged and even harder to engage new ones. The Wikipedia communities are an example for extraordinary user engagement and in a lot of cases the role model when it comes to the success of collaborative online projects. At Wikimedia Germany we support not only the communities behind projects such as Wikipedia and Wikidata but are constantly developing strategies and actions to collect and freely share knowledge that fully represents human diversity. What kind of methods does it need to support long time contributors and at the same time form a welcoming environment for a diverse community? What can design do to support such endeavors?

About our speakers

Scott Gould

Scott Gould is the go-to expert on engagement, and what makes people engage with ideas, brands, organisations, and each other.

Formerly a church pastor, Scott learned first hand about human behaviour, the power of engagement, and the perilous misuse of that power. As a consultant, he now advises some of the world’s biggest brands and oldest organisations on getting people highly engaged around their cause.

A popular and passionate keynote speaker, Scott offers a message of real engagement in a world were so much is only skin-deep. His book, The Shape of Engagement, details his framework that unlocks how engagement works.

Hanna Petruschat

Hanna Petruschat is a UX and Interaction Designer with an analytic and open mindset. She seeks meaningful challenges that bring unobtrusive interactions to people using products ranging from websites, apps and physical objects to social experiences. Connections of unexpected kinds and a holistic view on the world make her ask critical questions and deliver creative and thoughtful solutions.
By working in Germany, California and India, Hanna has experienced various cultures and is currently based in Berlin, working for Wikimedia Germany and the Burg Giebichenstein University of Arts and Design Halle.

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Leadership in Design

Dear IxDAb'ties,

We’ve made it back from Interaction 19 in Seattle and brought along our refreshed selves. Let's start into spring together with a BANG! We’ve invited Pamela Mead and Temi Adeniyi to discuss Leadership in Design with all of us!

If you aren't able to make it at 7pm, please join us as usual, for post event drinks and mingling, at 8MM Bar next door, Schönhauser Allee 177b, 10119 Berlin – here's a map.

See you over deep thoughts and Berlin skyline views,

Kathryn, Audrey, Thomas and Jay

Design Leadership for Imposters

Temi Adeniyi, Head of Design at Blinkist

Over the years, you worked hard to become a great designer — you practised your craft, honed your skills and finally put those Imposter Syndrome days behind you. Now, with your experience in tow, you've taken the step into leadership. But yet you find yourself wondering: "Wait. Am I even doing this right?" and asking "what the hell am I am doing here?". For anyone new to leading a design team and feeling like an imposter: you're not alone. In this session, I'll share my experience and thoughts on how to move from feeling like you're faking it to finding your voice as a leader.

Reflections from Inside of Companies

Pamela Mead, VP of Global Product Design at Delivery Hero

Recently, FastCompany headlined an interview of John Maeda about his latest DesignInTech presentation at SXSW as “John Maeda: 'In reality, design is not that important'”. Needless to say, it set off a Twitter storm that he has eloquently responded to in his blog about what he really said and meant. Both the FC article and the response highlight today’s demands on design leadership: how much is the organization setting up Design to have impact? How are we leading designers in “the squad” model that is increasingly decentralized and focused on unicorn designers? I want to share my reflections on these questions and open the dialog for how to get to a point of delivering Designs that are truly customer centric.

About our speakers

Temi Adeniyi

Temi is Head of Design at Blinkist. In a career spanning 10 years, her experience has ran the gamut from design for the HERE Maps platform at Nokia, helping travellers find things to do at GetYourGuide, and exploring all facets of digital design from motion to shiny online campaigns for clients such as Mercedes-Benz, Sony and more. For the past 4 years, Temi has been heading up design at Blinkist. She joined to build and lead the design team and to help realise the companies mission of inspiring curious people to keep learning.

Pamela Mead

As VP of Global Product Design at Delivery Hero, Pamela focuses on building a global community of designers with a shared mission for creating customer focused, authentic local experiences. She leads a Berlin based global team and works with a team of designers located in LATAM, MENA and SE Asia.

Pamaela spent the last 15 years building design teams and practices in companies as diverse as Palm, Yahoo!, Intuit, Telefonica, and HERE Technologies. Her work has always focused on involving emerging technologies to create meaningful products and services that have a positive impact on people’s lives. Her priority is solving the right problems in ways that delight through simplicity, effectiveness and integrity.

As a design executive, Pamela has brought customer focus to innovation and agile product development practices, working in areas that include connected cars, urban mobility, video, financial and communication services, and health care. She is currently exploring the intersection between design and data, machine learning and AI. She believes it is essential that designers participate deeply in building the intelligence that will drive our experiences in the future.

Prior to moving into leadership positions at large corporations, Pamela led interdisciplinary teams at leading Design consulting firms like MetaDesign, Fitch and Doblin (Monitor). She holds several patents for mobile and television interfaces and is a frequent presenter at conferences. She holds a MS from the Institute of Design, IIT/Chicago.

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Diversity and Inclusion in Design

Dear IxDAb'ties,

You are cordially invited to join us for our 69th event as part of the inaugural World Interaction Design Day under the global theme of Diversity and Inclusion in Design, where we will be discussing with Ushahidi's Eriol Fox, hailing from Bristol/UK, and Marley Spoon's Quinn Keast from Berlin.

If you aren’t able to make it at 7pm, please join us as usual, for some post event drinks and mingling at Reingold, Novalisstr. 11, 10115 Berlin, just around the block – here's a map.

We're looking forward to seeing you to share in an evening of talks and chats,

Jay, Kathryn, Thomas and Audrey

Breaking unintended barriers in your workplace for more inclusive teams

Quinn Keast, Senior UX/UI Designer at Marley Spoon

As UX designers, we advocate for accessibility in our products, services, and experiences every day. But we often overlook our own workplaces. To make our teams and workplaces more inclusive for everyone, we need to be aware of the unintended barriers that we create for our current and potential employees who have physical or mental disabilities — which have surprising parallels to familiar concepts in UX. As a UX designer with hearing loss, Quinn will explore some of these barriers in connection to his own experiences, and share how we're uniquely positioned to take an active role in removing barriers in our workplaces to build stronger teams.

Diverse representations in design and awkward conversations with colleagues

Eriol Fox, UX & Product Designer at Ushahidi

Even if inclusion is at the front of your mind, it's difficult to feed that into creative work, especially if you're the only one and doubly so if you have to convince your users as well as your colleagues.

When working in design and user experience, people that need accessible and inclusive products of experiences often get referred to as 'edge cases' and subsequently pushed out of scope. It's never easy to convince bosses or colleagues that aren't themselves 'edge cases' to take the time and spend the resource caring for those that need more diverse design and representation in our visuals. Covering real-life past examples of frustrations from projects that didn't go so well, ones that did go well and how I work as much diversity and inclusivity into my work as I can possibly get away with now with the hope to not only make it the standard approach from the companies and people that I work with, but also for the customers and end-users that are not the edge cases, to consider that products, services and marketing should be representative for and of everyone, not just them.

About our speakers

Quinn Keast

Quinn has 9 years of experience in UX and design, and recently relocated to Berlin from Canada for the role of Senior UX/UI Designer at Marley Spoon. Quinn started his career as a designer with a leading branding and design agency, then joined a major non-profit environmental conservancy, where he lead UX strategy and design. He also co-founded Caribou, a UX consultancy, where he worked with startups and organizations across the country to create better user experiences through research, strategy, and design.

Eriol Fox

Eriol is a product designer at the global non-profit organisation Ushahidi working on the end-to end process of design practice for digital products. From research, ideation through to visual execution, they focus on user centered design and research that is inclusive of marginalised folks by default.

With 10 years of experience as a professional designer Eriol has worked in-house at large corporates that have dealt in Electronics, Insurance, Risk Management, Housing and start-up applications. They have provided freelance work for non-profits and community groups and is actively involved in various non-profits from environmental the arts to LGBTQ+ issues. They also sit on the advisory board for a local Women's Tech Hub.

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10 Years IxDA Berlin

Dear IxDAb'ties,

Can you believe it's already been a decade since IxDA Berlin has become a staple design community of Berlin, bringing together students, practitioners and industry experts? This calls for a drink. Or five!

Join us to celebrate 10 years of IxDA Berlin:

  • From 4pm: an afternoon with friends and family! There's a huge playground available and we have a family friendly environment right on the Landwehr canal, so bring your kids, dogs and relatives for a chance to introduce them to the lovely bunch you're (net)working with at IxDA Berlin.

    !! No ticket required for afternoon access for your friends and family !!

  • From 6pm:three international speakers (ticket req'd, must be 18 or older)
  • From 8:30pm: a BBQ and additional outdoor fun (ticket req'd, must be 18 or older)
  • From ~10pm: a party night full of music and celebration (ticket req'd, must be 18 or older)

NO MORE TICKET AVAILABLE? Volunteer and automatically get a ticket: sign up here to volunteer

Let's celebrate together!

Thomas, Audrey, Jay and Kathryn

Shaping Design, Designers and Teams

Jason Mesut, Director, Resonant Design and Innovation

Jason will share the latest of his work over the past decade developing visual frameworks for design teams, leaders and designers to map their skills and define their future professional development.

Through his role as a team leader, and with workshops he runs with the community and his clients, he has seen how valuable it is for designers to self-reflect on who they are, and project the areas in which they feel like they should develop. Whether that’s within, or beyond the context of the organisation they work.

He believes using these visual frameworks can help:

  • Hire the right people and build the right teams for your organisation
  • Reflect on your own abilities as designers, leaders and managers
  • Direct your own and your team’s development
  • Teams feel better about who they are within their organization and recognize the opportunities of staying rather than leaving to grow themselves.

Diagnosis: UX Charlatans

Martina Mitz, UX Psychologist(, Strategist and Designer)

User Experience (UX) is probably one of the fastest evolving and most exciting disciplines to be a part of these days. As the practical value of UX-work has become more and more obvious in the past few years, the demand for UX Designers and experts has grown exponentially.

Unfortunately, there are hardly any official educational paths or certifications yet and the confusion around UX is very broad – UX is becoming a buzzword. As a result, the market is not only confused or has at best a very narrow understanding of the term, but this also offers a soil for many amateurs and fake representatives of the discipline to evolve.

Over the past few years, Martina has had the (dis)pleasure to meet and work with some highly promoted UX Charlatans, so that over time she started spotting the patterns – some of their similarities and tactics. Martinas aim is to share her observations in this presentation, in the hope to save you some time, money, and frustration – no matter if you are an evolving UX Designer or a Business/Project owner in need of UX expertise.

EthUX – seven deadly sins that keep us from building a better world

Eric Reiss, CEO, The FatDUX Group

(In Eric's own words) I started working with interaction design long before the term was even known. Over the past 35 years, I've encountered many issues that have disturbed me – from creating purposely addictive programs, sites, and apps, to the current zeitgeist for responsive design at the expense of basic usability. I have seen research that is forged, ignored, or twisted by internal company politics and by the cognitive bias of the design team. And I have seen countless dark patterns that serve to suppress accessibility and diversity, and encourage false beliefs and false security.

I hope you will share an hour of your time with me so I can review some of the issues you should be thinking about. And to show you how your work can truly create value – not just for your client or company, but for everyone.

About our speakers

Jason Mesut

Jason has spent over 17 years working within UX at some of the largest and some of the most respected agencies within the UK. Over these years, he has struggled to know what to call himself. Management consultant, digital strategist, service designer, product manager, interaction designer or user experience consultant. Just some of the labels he has used. Through his work he doesn’t think that the labels matter that much. It’s more about the specific skills you offer.

Currently, Jason runs Resonant Design and Innovation, a consultancy that gives his clients more of his time. He works with partners to help them with their challenges. Building teams. Creating solutions that push the envelope but are actually delivered. Always focusing on achieving value to businesses, employees, and the users or customers they serve. Jason also runs highly in-demand monthly local IxDA London events with his co-leader, Boon Chew.

Martina Mitz

Martina started as a self-taught Web Designer in 2001. From the very beginning her approach was user-centered despite not being familiar with the now-common phrase of User Experience. In 2007 she finalized her study in Psychology and started working in the field of clinical Psychology. It was at this point that Martina's academic background and her passion joined and she started a career as UX Designer, being called "Conceptioner" at first. Since then Martina has not only contributed to the digital and service ecosystems of many recognizable companies (e.g. eBay, PayPal, Emirates Airlines, Volkswagen, Telekom and many more), but she also helped selected startups in Europe, by forming and driving their research, as well as contributing to their product or service strategy and definition.

Eric Reiss

Eric Reiss has held a wide range of eclectic jobs: piano player (in a house of ill-repute), senior copywriter (in an ad-house of ill-repute), player-piano repairman, adventure-game creator, and stage director. His experiences have served him admirably as a designer, content strategist, information architect, interaction designer, and usability "expert" - although he can't explain exactly how.

In more mundane lives, Eric has been a two-term president of the Information Architecture Institute and Professor of Usability and Design at IE Business School in Madrid, Spain. Today, Eric is CEO of the FatDUX Group in Copenhagen, Denmark, a leading UX company with offices and associates in over a dozen cities worldwide. He also has several books to his credit, including the best-selling "Usable Usability," which is now available in five languages. You'll find him on Twitter at @elreiss.

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Research In Motion

Dear IxDAb’ties,

Berlin is hotter than evarr!!11 and we're about to turn up the heat even moarR. 🔥

(Can you feel it?)

Yes you can, if you appear to be that Berlin-typical one lone user researcher at inhouse product development. As far as our own research turned up, at other times, it seems like designers are undertaking user research. As we just don’t have enough resources… (?)

Regardless if you’ve felt alone, or want to dive deeper into the domain of user research, come and join our next event for an evening with seasoned user researchers Tamara Lopez Breit and Lindsey Wallace. Our speakers expect folks that are active in the field for some years. (Gulp. Just starting to dive into the topic? OK can you feel the heat now? 👀)

Expert or Novice: Get out of your building and join us!

If you aren’t able to make it at 7pm, please join us as usual, for some post event drinks and mingling at Maximilians Beer Garden, Friedrichstraße 185-190, 10117 Berlin, just down the street – here's a map.

Looking forward seeing you with your summer vibes on!

Kathryn, Jay, Audrey and Thomas

Establishing the UX research practice in a digital product company

Tamara Lopez Breit, Sr. UX Researcher at GetYourGuide

Having an impact on the product and breaking down organizational walls isn't a quick job. We'll discuss the evolution of user research within a company, and why becoming user-centric starts from inside. Tamara has been working at GetYourGuide for just over a year. She will share insights into her role, lessons learned and the constant drive within the company to put a human face on the people who use their products. She will talk about research artifacts and how to collect quality data, as well as the benefits of communication to provide value to different internal audiences. According to the UX maturity level of your company, different changes and levels of expertise are required (that’s why this can last for years.) Addressing company culture is fundamental to success.

Getting away from success to get more out of user research

Lindsey Wallace, Experience Researcher at Adobe

Using prototypes for research offers rich possibilities to learn about the ways users think, understand tools, and approach problems. However, we often focus too narrowly on user success with our proposed solutions and getting the user through the session with tools like detailed task lists. This costs us opportunities to observe users struggle and learn how they solve problems, as well as the chance to understand whether we're solving the right problem for them. The Adobe Design Research and Strategy team has ditched task lists during prototype sessions in favor of less directional approaches that allow space for frustration and failure. This talk will discuss Adobe's approach and techniques for transforming prototype sessions from validation exercises to opportunities for deep learning about your users and how they think.

About our speakers

Tamara Lopez Breit

Tamara Lopez Breit works as a UX researcher at GetYourGuide. Being the first member of the Research Team, she establishes processes and advocates for research within the company. Previously, she worked as a UX consultant for agencies and startups in Europe and Latam. She was a lecturer of UX at the University of Palermo for two and a half years in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where she is from.

Lindsey Wallace

As a qualitative user researcher on the Adobe Design Research and Strategy team Lindsey spent the last 2 years studying diverse and interesting populations of creative professionals. She brings knowledge about their practices, needs, and motivations back to the product teams at Adobe. Currently, Lindsey is leading research for Adobe XD and her focus is on understanding digital and UX designers. As an anthropologist she is using her observation skills and experience understanding individuals in their broader contexts to explain user problems and provide insights into the cultures and values that shape users interactions and experiences with products.

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Children’s Rights and Ethics in Design

Dear IxDAb’ties,

This January, 70+ designers, psychologists, neuroscientists, health care specialists, educators, and children’s rights experts came together to develop the Designing for Children Guide during an intense 48-hours at the collaborative Talkoot event in Helsinki.

Leyla Nasib and Jonna Rantanen in partnership with UNICEF, are leading the initiative that was born out of Talkoot. They have since created Childrensdesignguide.org where the team is establishing a manifesto towards a new standard for both design and business. The goal is to direct the evolution towards products and services with ethics which have children’s best interests at their core.

At our next event Leyla and Jonna will talk about their work, present practical methods on embedding children’s needs in our everyday design process and will engage with us at IxDA Berlin to further refine the set of rules and actions that help us to design better products for everyone on this planet.

If you aren’t able to make it at 7pm, please join us as usual, for some post event drinks and mingling at The Irish Times, Leipziger Str. 56, 10117 Berlin, just across the big street. – here's a map.

See you there, kids! Thomas, Kathryn, Audrey and Jay

Children’s Rights and Ethics in Design

Leyla Nasib, Experience and Service Designer
Jonna Rantanen, Service Designer and Design Researcher

In this talk Leyla and Jonna introduce the principles of incorporating children’s rights in to everyday design work. Along with a bunch of real world examples the two Helsinki-based designers give insights from their work with UNICEF and an outstanding number of volunteering design-driven that helped shaping this program. The two will discuss how society can build better products that target children in context, taking everything from from social media to household appliances into consideration.

About our speakers

Leyla Nasib

Leyla is an experience and service designer based in Helsinki with a passion for social and urban design. She believes in design as a road to positive transformations and empowering experiences through inclusive participatory processes.

Jonna Rantanen

Jonna is a service designer and design researcher with over 7 years of experience in visual, concept and experience design. Currently, she works on a holistic customer experience and design research at Elisa, a major Finnish telecom company. Previously she has been leading the design for a one-tablet-per-child service for a Children's hospital, aiming to improve the small patients and their families experience during their time in the hospital, and also creating better experiences for the users in wellbeing, education and game industries. She is interested in the emotional and cognitive basis of our experiences and thoughts, ethical design & business and designing for children's rights.

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Criticism, Space and the “Why” of Design

Dear IxDAb’ties,

Are you curious about the next dimension of interaction design? Eager to discuss the way we discuss design with a true veteran of the trade? At our next event, we’ll have access to the stage doors of Interaction 18, the industry event of the year, and we come to you full of inspiration and learnings after a week of deep thoughts on interaction design.

We are stoked to present two outstanding speakers from Interaction 18 to you at this #IxD18 Redux: Khoi Vinh, named one of "the 50 Most Influential Designers in America", and Sjors Timmer, a well seasoned designer and speaker now living in Berlin, will join us in giving you the low down from Interaction Week.

If you aren’t able to make it at 7pm, please join us as usual, for some post event drinks and mingling at Café Wendel, Schlesische Str. 42, 10997 Berlin, just across the Spree – here's a map.

Spaceward ho!, and down to earth, Jay, Kathryn, Thomas and Audrey

Space as a medium for interaction design

Sjors Timmer, Senior Interaction Designer

In the past 50 years computers have infiltrated the work environment to the point where there’s hardly a job left where they are not used. In the process, however, a rich continuum of understanding the world through sound, touch, spatial interactions has been flattened to pictures behind glass that are either manipulated through mice or touch interactions.

New technical developments such as augmented reality and spatial computing offer the opportunity to rethink how we can incorporate our body in knowledge work. To do this successfully we have to let go of design concepts that have been developed for a world of flat screens and start over with designing for digital spatial interactions.

Building on the work of Paul Dourish on embodied interaction design and David Kirsh on the use of space for cognitively demanding tasks Sjors will discuss a framework for thinking about and designing for spatial interactions.

Thinking critically about design and criticism

Khoi Vinh, Principal Designer at Adobe

Thoughtful criticism of the work that designers do is limiting us on many levels.

As design continues to gain traction in business and culture, its utter lack of critical discourse becomes more and more glaring. We are adept at discussing the “how” of design, but our inability to discuss the “why” continues to hobble the profession’s further evolution.

In this lively, down-to-earth talk, Adobe Principal Designer Khoi Vinh, a veteran of design’s transformation into a key element of modern business over the past two decades, looks at the gaps in how we discuss and think about design, explains why criticism is so important to the future of our craft, and proposes ways forward to correct the situation.

About our speakers

Sjors Timmer

Sjors Timmer is a senior interaction designer living in Berlin. He specialises in helping large companies and organisations with complex needs to create simple, understandable digital services. Sjors has worked for Specsavers, Zopa, Farfetch, London School of Economics and the UK Ministry of Justice.

He is interested in placing interaction design within a wider historical and philosophical context. In London Sjors has organised several meetups of the Design History Reading Club, where they read their way through classic papers that foreshadowed interaction design. He has done talks on time as design element at Euro IA and how hermeneutics can help us understand our relation to the past, at UX Brighton.

Khoi Vinh

Khoi Vinh is Principal Designer at Adobe, where he is charged with aligning Adobe’s design initiatives more closely with its customers, its partners and the community. Previously, he was design director for The New York Times. He writes a widely read blog on design and technology at Subtraction.com and lives in Brooklyn, NY with his family.

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UXmas 2017

Dear IxDAb'ties and all Berlin Design Communities,

Wrap yourselves in mistletoe and ensure that your phone is fully charged. Leave those sketches at home and let your hair down, because we are heading to the most epic of all christmas parties for 2017!

Nine years counting, IxDA Berlin is pulling together all Berlin Design Communities for the annual UXmas, and this year is no different. Let’s mingle for the season’s last hurrah with a time to boogie, play some funky tunes and heck, even throw on some reindeer antlers.

1. Thanks to our awesome sponsors SAP, McKinsey and HERE we have secured the freaking Berghain Kantine for all of us and are happy to present a whopping three DJ sets PLUS a secret live act! BÄÄM!!

2. Thanks to our special food sponsor Ableton we'll have an Abletonicious Free Meal (for those that join early) at our UXmas Food Truck! Woohoo!!

3. And with the support of AJ&Smart, Sevenval, Cromatics, kfzteile24.de, Cornelsen and TestingTime we will all enjoy free drinks (until the budget is out)! Prost!!

Together with our friends at Ladies That UX, Service Design Berlin, UXD Berlin, JAM Berlin, UX/UI, Berlin Designing AI and UX Book Club we are working hard on perhaps even one more suprise, so stay tuned!

Please note:

- Doors open 7:30 pm
- STRICT CAPACITY LIMIT (it IS going to be packed)
- first come first served (either be early or be really late)
- 18yrs+
- NO PERSONAL TICKET NO ADMISSION

Seasons greetings!

Thomas, Jay, Audrey and Kathryn

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Principles over Process

Dear IxDAb’ties,

As the days grow colder we are rubbing our hands together in preparation to welcome our following event’s guest, Jeff Gothelf. Nicknamed the King of Lean, at event #63 we will be discussing how to implement lean design practices into any sized company or product in practice together with Jeff. Join us!

If you aren’t able to make it at 7pm, please join us as usual, for some post event drinks and mingling at Café Wendel, Schlesische Str. 42, 10997 Berlin, just across the Spree – here's a map.

From the warmth of the IxDAb office, Audrey, Jay, Kathryn and Thomas

Scaling Lean: Principles over Process

Jeff Gothelf, Designer, Team Leader, Author and Coach

The term Lean has become widely popular, particularly with the word “startup” attached to it. This has led many people to believe this is an approach to work relevant only to new companies or initiatives. Lean-curious companies who have tried to implement these ideals often stall at one or two teams citing organizational complexities, politics and dependencies as insurmountable obstacles to Lean Startup at scale.

Can Lean Startup practices be scaled — not just as culture and philosophy but as tactical process? In this practical presentation, Jeff will share several methods for scaling Lean Startup techniques in large organizations exemplified in detailed case studies and professional experience. Jeff will cover knowledge management, intra-team dependencies, infrastructure requirements and several other elements of ensuring successful Lean Startup practices in companies of any size.

About our speakers

Jeff Gothelf

Jeff is an interaction designer from New Jersey. As director of user experience for TheLadders.com, Jeff worked at the Agile coalface, integrating design thinking into a traditional Agile process. Since then, Jeff has become one of the world’s leading proponents of Lean UX. His articles for Harvard Business Review catapulted Lean UX into the consciousness of the business world, something we’re all thankful for. Jeff's work today mainly focuses on building and training evidence-based, customer-centered executive & product teams. These teams often utilise lean principles and agile software development. Jeff is in huge demand as he travels the world coaching design teams on how to work more effectively.

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Design or Decoration?

Dear IxDAb’ties,

Cortana. Alexa. Siri. OK Google. Perhaps we had forgotten these names over our summer break. Getting back into the swing of things at work, we may be reflecting our life choices and reconsider taking up the offer of moving to an off-the-grid farm from that traveller we met. Hmm. He didn’t have a smartphone to talk to, and he still seemed OK. Strange…

We had so much time to think about our jobs, away from the keyboard. We want more of that, heck we want to make products that matter, we are reconsidering our career in tech. But as we come back to work, that all fades. We get into the treadmill and we think about the next task at work. The ethics of our work falls to the bottom of our Prio list.

Take a couple of hours out of that busy schedule. Let’s take a critical look at the swing of things, bringing in Aral Balkan, a cyborg rights activist, designer, and developer ("The Ethical Design Manifesto"), to discuss social justice in the digital age.

If you aren’t able to make it at 7pm, please join us as usual, for some post event drinks and mingling at Café Wendel, Schlesische Str. 42, 10997 Berlin, just across the Spree – here's a map.

Let’s continue the year with a spark,

Kathryn, Thomas, Audrey and Jay

Design is ethical or it is decoration.

Aral Balkan, Cyborg rights activist, designer, and developer

I am a business that makes money by tracking every move you, your family, and your loved ones make, both online and offline. I aggregate and store that information forever. I continuously analyse every piece of it to profile you and understand you better. I do all this to exploit my intimate insight into your life to manipulate your behaviour for profit and to satisfy my political needs.

Sounds terrible, doesn’t it?
Hi, my name is Google.
And Facebook.
And Snapchat... (should I go on?)

The business model of mainstream technology (the Silicon Valley model) is based on farming people. The goal is to create a digital copy of you, own that copy, and exploit it as an invaluable proxy to manipulate your behaviour. (Oh, and by the way, sometimes we’ll also share our insight with repressive governments and spy agencies too.) This business model is a core pillar of the socio-techno-economic system we call surveillance capitalism. It is inherently exploitative, unethical, and incompatible with human rights or democracy.

If the core of our business – the way we make money – is unethical, how can we expect our products to be ethical? The answer is, we can’t. Design without ethics is decoration.

Thankfully, the Silicon Valley model is just one possible way to build technology. There are alternative – ethical – ways to design and build technologies that are decentralised, free and open, and interoperable.

The nature of the technologies we build and adopt determine no less than the type of society we live in today and in the future. Is that an authoritarian, feudal society ruled by monolithic all-knowing corporations or a democracy? If you want to help build and live in the latter future, this talk show you how to get started on the right path. Come with an open mind, prepare to question everything you know, and to learn an eye- opening and ethical new way to design and build technology.

About our speakers

Aral Balkan

Aral is a cyborg rights activist, designer, and developer.

He is one-third of Ind.ie, a tiny two-person-and-one-husky social enterprise working for social justice in the digital age.

Aral is the author of the web privacy tool Better and the Ethical Design Manifesto. You can find him online at https://ar.al.

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Beyond Theory

Dear IxDAb’ties,

We are back from summer break, and while some lows brought us a lot of wet we have queued up some cracking events for you.

To kick off we invited Val Head to help us look over the edge and learn about the state of animation and how it helps us to improve Interaction Design. And just in case that doesn’t get us enough engagement we’re leveling up the game and discuss the use of Lasers in Interaction Design with Seb Lee-Delisle!

If you aren’t able to make it at 7pm, please join us as usual, for some post event drinks and mingling at Café Wendel, Schlesische Str. 42, 10997 Berlin, just across the Spree – here's a map.

Lasers!!

Jay, Kathryn, Audrey and Thomas

UX in Motion: Principles for creating meaningful animation in interfaces

Val Head, Designer & Interface Animation Consultant

Animation is a powerful design tool that we too often ignore. When used well motion can engage, communicate and improve interactions. That’s the kind of animation we want in our work: animation that has both purpose and style. Carefully crafting these moments makes our work more memorable and enjoyable to use. In this session we’ll discuss where animation can best inform UX and how to build more sophisticated animated interactions on the web.

UXXL - user experience, supersized

Seb Lee-Delisle, Digital Artist

Seb is a digital artist who likes to create large scale interactive installations, using high power projectors, lasers, and sound systems to make truly memorable and enormous work. In this fun and interactive talk, Seb will show how he scales up his digital works from his computer monitor to a 20m wide screen, and brings computing from a cosy office space into the great outdoors.

About our speakers

Val Head

Val Head is a web animation expert, author, and Design Evangelist at Adobe. She is the author of Designing Interface Animation, published by Rosenfeld Media, teaches CSS Animation on lynda.com, and curates the weekly UI Animation Newsletter.

Seb Lee-Delisle

Seb Lee-Delisle is a digital artist and speaker who uses computers to engage with people and inspire them.
As an artist, he likes to make interesting things from code that encourage interaction and playfulness from the public. Notable projects include Lunar Trails, featuring a 3m wide drawing machine, and PixelPyros, the Arts Council funded digital fireworks display that toured nationwide in 2013.
As a speaker he demystifies programming and explores its artistic possibilities. His presentations and workshops enable artists to overcome their fear of code and encourage programmers of all backgrounds to be more creative and imaginative.
His recent work Laser Light Synths won the 2016 Lumen Interactive Prize. He won 3 Microsoft awards in 2013, and he was Technical Director on Big and Small, the BBC project that won a BAFTA in 2009.

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Shaping Healthcare

Dear IxDAb’ties,

As we move into the summer season, our faces are sunkissed and full of vitamin D. We are at the peak of our health, spending afternoons next to the Spree appreciating great health and, when weather permits, a pleasant temperature too. Yet we want to pull you away from this, for one evening, to discuss how we as designers are guiding the future of healthcare.

This July, we invite our community to come together with Marion and Frederike from the SAP innovation centre in Potsdam, and John from the Dublin based design agency Frontend.com, to inform us about their work in the healthcare sector, and the results and implications of their projects in this industry. As well as the talks, we will also have our usual pre and post talk banter, including the open mic and the job board.

If you aren’t able to make it at 7pm, please join us as usual, for some post event drinks and mingling at Café Cinema, Rosenthaler Str. 39, 10178 Berlin, just next door – here's a map.

Stay healthy,

Kathryn, Thomas, Audrey and Jay

Developing for the future of Healthcare

John Buckley, UX Designer

John Buckley will be flying in from Dublin to share his insights on designing for the constrained world of healthcare. He is a UX Designer at Frontend.com, a user experience consultancy which has worked extensively in the field of healthcare.

During this talk, John will share the story of a design collaboration he led between Frontend.com, the United Nations' migration body (IOM) and four design colleges seeking to conceptualise a 'Future Vision for Migrant Healthcare'. This project was named as a finalist in two categories and received the People's Choice Award at IxDA Interaction 17 earlier this year.

Digital Health: Roll-your-sleeves-up

Marion Fröhlich, UX Manager
Frederike Wanstrath, UI/UX Designer

The digitalization is radically transforming the healthcare sector. Big data, interconnectivity, automation and customer expectations are changing today's healthcare landscape. While there are plenty of opportunities for improving healthcare services, the actual challenge is to design and ship digital solutions that not only change people's lives for the better, but also create a sustainable business model for different stakeholders.

While several mobile applications exist to document the intake of medication or to track the vital data and via mobile phones, we face the challenge to systematically integrate this data into treatment process of physician and general practitioner in order to improve patient outcome. How can we build digital services that consider the whole healthcare ecosystem?

In their talk Marion and Frederike will share their personal insights won at SAP Health Innovation Hub, where they discover and craft new products and services in the area of personalized medicine and life sciences. From creating seamless experiences to privacy restrictions to cultural shifts, they will address today's challenges of healthcare designers.

About our speakers

John Buckley

John has spoken in the US and Europe. Not just passionate about design, John is also interested in building communities, co-founding Serve the City, an Irish based NGO serving the cities marginalised, as well as playing in the Irish Dodgeball Team.

Marion Fröhlich

Marion is leading the design team of the SAP Health Innovation Hub, where the team crafts new digital solutions together with customers and end-users. Prior to this Marion worked as a strategic design consultant and user experience manager for different companies, helping customers to establish design practices within their organizations and building award-winning consumer products.

Frederike Wanstrath

As a user experience designer, Frederike creates SAP's next generation enterprise applications for personalized medicine and life sciences. Having an e-commerce background from her work at the digital lab of Chantelle, user satisfaction and state-of-the-art visual designs are her passion.

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Everything Ends

Dear IxDAb’ties,

While the end is always near for some people out there, everything has an end. Designing precisely timed onboarding experiences and retaining our users we all do. But we tend to forget about designing off-boarding experiences.

It is time to learn to say goodbye to our users without injuring future relationships or neglecting our relationships up to date. Closure experiences can help improve the wider consumer experience, improve long term brand reputation, and importantly help consumers reflect about their consumption habits.

At this combined presentation and workshop we will have a jam packed evening led by our expert speaker Joe Macleod, with everything from the history of product termination experiences, current trends and insights, case studies and the time to develop our own closure experience. Afterwards there is as usual, room for discussion, questions and opinions as well as the IxDA Berlin regulars - open mic rounds and job announcements.

If you aren’t able to make it at 7pm, please join us as usual, for some post event drinks and mingling at Bar 3, Weydingerstraße 20, 10178 Berlin, just across the street – here's a map.

We’ll be back!

Jay, Kathryn, Audrey and Thomas

Closure Experiences (Interactive Workshop)

Joe Macleod, Consultant

At a time when it seems everyone is starting up a new business, getting new users to start a new account, buying new hardware to achieve access to new services, Joe will tell you why we need to start considering endings.

There is compelling evidence to suggest that we have lost a vocabulary around how to end our consumer relationships. What is common amongst some of society’s biggest problems is trying to stop what we have started. End what we have begun. It isn’t enough to be a new starter in this world that is aching under problems that we have created, it will be important to end things appropriately, without negative consequences.

In this session Joe will share the background and long history of endings. He will show how these have impacted our consumer experiences, and how, in some cases, this has critically impacted the consumer behaviour. Together, we will look at models and techniques, and spend some time developing and designing closure experiences in workshops.

About our speakers

Joe Macleod

Joe Macleod has been working on the issue of Closure Experiences for 15 years. Through his work in design, technology and services, he has detected a common pattern of denial at the end of the customer lifecycle. In the last couple of years this interest has led him to establish a research project based on sharing this insight and new approach with people via conferences, articles, teaching, projects and - soon - a book.

His 20-year professional career has been based across the leading web, telecoms and carrier companies, where he led teams and built a variety of successful products. Most recently as Head of Design at the award-winning digital product studio Ustwo, he built it into a globally recognised team, working with the world’s favourite brands on the most pioneering of products. In 2013 he founded the IncludeDesign campaign; this brought the UK’s leading designers together to champion creative education.

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Design Against Populism

Dear All,

Uncertain times demand concrete action.

Please join us at IxDA Berlin this month, for a workshop which aims to discover what we, as Designers, can do to halt the spread of right wing populism throughout Germany in the lead up to the country’s upcoming election.

Throughout this evening, we will discuss specific skills designers can bring to the table in this heated political debate, how senior members of our community deal with these issues and we’ll even have time to get our hands dirty.

We have prepared a design challenge for you, meaning at this event you won’t be passively listening, but participate alongside others to earn your pizza and beer for the evening. We’ll be whiteboarding, post-it noting and endure scribble madness! - Just don’t say we never ever warned you. As these issues are very real, and time is upon us, we aim to leave the building with a concrete plan of action that we can publish to other Designers around the country.

Don’t lean back and work with us at the workshop.

We’ll have an hour of hand-on group work after some initial lighting talks and topic insights. Afterwards there is as usual, room for discussion, questions and opinions as well as the IxDA Berlin regulars - open mic rounds and job announcements.

Join us for an evening about the future of Germany!

If you aren’t able to make it at 7pm, please join us for some post event drinks and mingling at Bar 3, Weydingerstraße 20, 10178 Berlin, just across the street – here's a map.

See you there,

Thomas, Audrey, Jay and Kathryn

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The Design Powerhouse

Dear IxDAb'ties,

The annual IxDA conference Interaction 17 went down in February with all the up and coming trends for 2017. We’ve been in New York for you, and at our next event, together with speakers and attendees of Interaction 17, we are going to share all the important learnings with you!

Our guest speaker Carina Kuhr will tell us insights from the UX Job Title Survey. She'll share their findings about the relationship between job titles, skills and the roles behind, as well as current patterns on that topic.

Sandra Griffel and Melanie Weißenborn, both Interaction 17 speakers and working as Director UX and Senior Information Architect at Denkwerk, are going to talk about The Rise of "Screenless" Interfaces. Melanie and Sandra will explain why screen based thinking has reached its limit, and will share their "Screenless Experience Canvas" with us.

As always, if you want to throw in a lightning talk, job offer or announcement, just let us know upfront. We'll be happy to have you take the stage for a minute or two.

After the event, which will be around 9:30pm, we'll be headed across the waterway to Cafe Wendel for drinks and chats. Everybody is invited to join us there, no registration required. Cafe Wendel is at Schlesische Str. 42, 10997 Berlin, and here's a map.

Join us for great conversations on 2017 design goals - see you there!
Audrey, Jay, Kathryn and Thomas

The Rise of "Screenless" Interfaces

Sandra Griffel, User Experience Design Director, denkwerk
Melanie Weißenborn, Senior Information Architect, denkwerk

Today consumers use their smartphone 5 hours a day on an average. It nearly seems like an artificial appendage. No wonder, that we – as UX designers – are trained, to find an app / mobile service to almost every problem our users are facing. But do we really solve our user’s problems or do we just force them to constantly stare at their phones? – A fast growing number of people feel that the latter is the case.

For the development of digital services, that facilitate more natural and less distracting forms of interaction with technology we created the "breakingtheglass" canvas as part of a comprehensive method for the ideation and development of screenless services and (digital) products. In our session we want to give you brief insight into the topic and our canvas.

Job Titles: The Survey Says...

Carina Kuhr, Senior UX Researcher, Zalando
Jay Kaufmann, UX Lead Talent & Community of Practice, Zalando

Job titles are a challenge for the digital product design crowd. How can UXers describe clearly what we do in as few words as possible? And how can companies improve their job ads to make the target group feel understood and attract UX talent?

It turns out, our field -- and our roles -- are difficult to pin labels onto. Whether it’s cause or effect, we inhabit a confusing and shifting terminology landscape.

Researchers, it turns out, struggle less to be understood. But designers seem to need to turn to storytelling: “Even your tea pot should be sexy. That's my job.”

We share the quotes, stories and results from the UX job title survey that we conducted last fall. Our goal was to see which word combinations bring the best clarity in our field, with its heterogenous nomenclature.

See how well Interaction Design emerges after going to head-to-head with UX, UI and Product Design. Hear the story of our own failure with job titles. Bring your own funny quotes.

About our speakers

Sandra Griffel

As user experience design director at denkwerk Sandra is responsible for the creation and delivery of innovative digital services and products. She is experienced in leading interdisciplinary teams in the delivery of sophisticated insight-led solutions that align key business drivers to user needs. Her track record includes a number of strategic projects for global brands including Condor, OBI, TUI and Deutsche Telekom.

Sandra contributes to local and international UX communities, speak at meet-ups and conferences and writes articles and whitepapers e.g. on contextual commerce and wearables.

Melanie Weißenborn

As a Senior Information Architect at denkwerk Melanie works with enthusiasm towards creating the most valuable user experience in a wide spectrum of digital projects.

Her experience ranges from developing complex e-commerce platforms to taking part in mobile app creation and enhancement. During her career, Melanie worked for global brands such as Deutsche Telekom, Condor and Zwilling J.A. Henckels.

Her current hobbyhorse is the practical use of Brad Frost’s atomic design approach as a tool to specify functionality and interaction behavior in a lean and systematic way.

Carina Kuhr

Carina built up the Agile UX Testing framework, has spurred and supported a range of customer centricity initiatives and recently helped to grow the UX Research Team at Zalando. She screened and interviewed many UX researchers in the last 12 month and shared some resulting insights into the UX of your CV. Her favorite UX research method is the diary study.

Jay Kaufmann

Jay hires UX designers and leaders for Zalando, creates professional development building blocks and executes miscellaneous management minutia like blocking designers’ calendars on Wednesdays so they can work. He wrote “How To Write Inspiring Job Descriptions For UX” for Smashing Magazine.

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Epic X-Mas Bash

Design your first x-mas hangover of the season!

String yourselves with glitter and fairy lights and leave those laptops at home, ladies and gentlemen, as we are all going to take the night off for the epic x-mas design event of 2016!

Eight years counting, IxDA Berlin has once again pulled Berlins design community together for one last Hurrah, to get a little bit silly, share a cocktail or three, and put on that Jingle Bells jumper you’ve been dying to wear (which smells like grandma’s mothball collection).

We've got a legendary venue, three DJs, free drinks (until the budget is out) and even more surprises! All this is only possible thanks to our awesome friends & sponsors:

Zalando, AJ & Smart, HERE, Ableton, Futurice, Wiredcraft

Hey, even Secret Santa is coming again this year and we need a gift from you to make it work! Bring along a gift and Santa will swap from one in his sack of goodies! Perhaps a great book you'd like to pass on, cookies & candy (homemade even?), or a present for less than €5 – anything you'd be happy to receive yourself...

SEE YOU AT THE PARTY!

Thomas, Kathryn, Jay and Audrey,
...together with our friends at JAM Berlin, UI/UX Berlin, Glug, Berlin UXD, Service Design Berlin and UX Book Club!

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Burning Down The House with Mike Monteiro

Dear IxDAb'ites,

John Snow said it best "Winter is coming" and he couldn't have been any more darned right. So, if you're like us, and you want to hibernate the winter away, come join us for some well needed toasty drinks and fire up the discussion with our awesome guest Mike Monteiro!

Mike will not only enjoy drinks alongside us, but as we dive deeper into the evening, he will share his thoughts on being a designer and his take on how we should interact with clients.

As always, if you want to throw in a lightning talk, job offer or announcement, just let us know upfront. We'll be happy to have you take the stage for a minute or two.

After the event, which will be around 10pm, we'll be headed across the waterway to Cafe Wendel for drinks and chats. Everybody is invited to join us there, no registration required. Cafe Wendel is at Schlesische Str. 42, 10997 Berlin, and here's a map.

Bring it on!
Audrey, Jay, Kathryn and Thomas

Burning Down The House with Mike Monteiro

Mike Monteiro, Design Director at Mule Design

About our speakers

Mike Monteiro

Mike Monteiro is the co-founder and design director of Mule Design. He prefers elegant, simple sites with clear language that serve a real need. He prefers that designers have strong spines. Mike writes and speaks frequently about the craft and business of design.

He loves client services so much he wrote two books on the topic, Design is a Job and You're My Favorite Client, both from A Book Apart. Mike received the 2014 Net award for Conference Talk of the Year for his inspirational polemic on responsibility, “How Designers Destroyed the World.”

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An Elevator Ride with Lou Rosenfeld

Press the elevator button. Wait for the signal. Doors slide away. Step inside …and meet none other than an Information Architecture legendary.

Book your calendars for the 2nd of November, as at our very next event, we are stoked to be joined by one of the co-creators of the profession of IA – Mr. Louis Rosenfeld. Lou takes the trip over the pond to join us in person for a very special evening.

During the evening, you will find yourself on this rare elevator ride with Lou, and have the opportunity to ask for his thoughts on IA, design and publishing. But get in early, seize this moment, and send in your upfront questions to be discussed with Lou, using this form. Hint: answer the form to slide away the doors to the link for mandatory registration!

Step into the elevator, lean back over drinks and a delicious bite provided by our superstar location sponsor Zalando, and interact and discuss all the night with our speaker and community!

As always, if you want to throw in a lightning talk, job offer or announcement, just let us know upfront. We'll be happy to have you take the stage for a minute or two.

After the event, which will be something between 9:30 and 10pm, we'll be headed just across the street to the awesome Bar3 for drinks and chats. Everybody is invited to join us there, no registration required. Bar3 is at Weydingerstr. 20, 10178 Berlin, and here's a map.

See you on the top,
Kathryn, Thomas, Audrey and Jay

An Elevator Ride with Lou Rosenfeld

Louis Rosenfeld, Designer, Publisher

This is an all-night Q&A session. Questions that have been submitted upfront will be curated and presented to Lou at the event. Be present, to ask your (additional) question to Lou on stage, in person!

About our speakers

Louis Rosenfeld

Hailed a "Technology Pioneer" of our time, Lou Rosenfeld wears two hats: consulting on information architecture strategy, and managing the popular UX publication house Rosenfeld Media. He has been instrumental in helping establish the fields of information architecture and user experience, and in articulating the role and value of librarianship within those fields.

Lou has written several publications, including co-authoring the best-selling book, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web and Search Analytics for Your Site. Lou also regularly contributes columns to CIO, Internet World and Web Review magazines, and has written and edited numerous other books, chapters, and scholarly articles. Lou has participated heavily in efforts to coalesce the information architecture community. He is co-founder of the Information Architecture Institute, the sole professional organization of information architects, and of the Information Architecture Summit — the field's annual conference.

Lou has keynoted and taught at dozens of professional and academic events on five continents.

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Design for Good

Dear everybody,

IxDA Berlin is back after a well needed summer holiday! Uhm… two words (“after”, “Summer”) in scary context. It’s the rise of the dark half of the year!! Well…

Fear not! Let’s shed light on stuff that really matters!

At this next event, we are focussing on how to use our skills for social impact. We are very pleased to be joined by N3xtcoder as well as Mr. Clive K. Lavery, who will be discussing how we can make a change as designers within our profession.

As with all activities of IxDA, we aim to gather the community of interaction designers and all others interested in the field to mingle, learn from each other and push hot topics forward. During the night, we will hang out, listen to awesome speakers, have time to ask questions, and maybe even find a new job opportunity.

So come along, socialize, and grab a delicious bite and free drinks - brought to you by our awesome sponsor Zalando!

Awaiting your social impact to the event. See you there!

Kathryn, Thomas, Jay and Audrey

Being a Digital Do-Gooder

Clive K. Lavery, Freelance UX Person

As digital designers we are constantly being told that we have the power to change the world.

But other than repeating this over and over again in our comfortable bubble of tech meetups, conferences or self centred documentaries how many of us actually use our perceived super powers for something more than making rich companies richer, selling more shoes online or creating something like "Uber for coat hangers"?

In my talk I will look at examples of applied digital do-goodism and discuss some strategies for how we can use our skills for social good. Slides may contain traces of half baked philosophy, social romanticism, self guilt and hopefully inspiration.

Clives Slidedeck is up on Slideshare

How to develop meaningful digital products?

Simon Stegemann, N3xtcoder

With more than 7 billion people on the planet we are living in a time of rapid change that bears tremendous opportunities, but also increasing risks. More than 3.5 billion people have access to the internet and rapidly advancing technologies fundamentally change the way we interact and connect with each other.

Nevertheless, we have mostly failed to use the full potential of these innovative technologies to solve society’s most pressing needs.

In my talk we learn how breakthrough technologies can tackle and solve exceptionally fast growing social problems globally. I will take a closer look at Ipso, the International Psychosocial Organisation that provide counseling to people from war affected countries to showcase and analyze success factors to create digital products that matter.

About our speakers

Clive K. Lavery

Clive is a Freelance UX Person with a focus on research, strategy and design based in Berlin where he also co-organises the annual UXcamp Europe and local UX Book Club.

He has more than 10 years of experience helping various agencies and in-house teams to make their users and clients happy and particularly enjoys working in collaborative environments with as much fun and little ego as possible.

A self-proclaimed Digital Do-Gooder he is also constantly looking for ways to use his experience for social good and as the son of a German mother and an English father he is also very good at being annoyingly pedantic while drinking large amounts of tea.

Simon Stegemann

Simon Stegemann is the Co-Founder of N3XTCODER, a digital agency, specialized in designing education programs and services that create social impact at scale. N3XTCODER sets a focus on how breakthrough technologies can tackle exceptionally fast growing social problems globally.

Simon studied business & arts at Alanus University; a dual degree program with the credo "to rethink economy" developed by dm-drogerie markt founder Götz Werner, Alnatura founder Götz Rehn, and many more value driven companies. After his studies he started to work at The Grameen Creative Lab founded by serial entrepreneur Hans Reitz and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Professor Muhammad Yunus.

Simons tech expertise builds on working at the digital agency edicos global where he developed websites and digital strategies for large corporations in the pharmaceutical industry. The past three years he helped to build up the team and develop partnerships as Business Development Manager and Head of Sales at the fin-tech startup paij. With N3XTCODER he wants to disrupt the social sector in order to create social impact at scale.

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IxDA Berlin SUMMER BBQ together with functionalaesthetics, Betahaus & Tech Open Air

It's BBQ time!

IxDAb is bursting into Summer this year alongside our friends at functionalaesthetics and Tech Open Air at one of our favourite hangouts, Betahaus. So come along for some great tunes, tasty food and wonderful selection of drinks to say cheers to the accomplishments we’ve made together, and great weather. If you’re lucky, we’ll make you a cocktail ourselves. We can discuss design, summer plans and what we at IxDA have in store for you for the remainder of the year. It will be low key, and everyone is welcome!

Eager to go to Tech Open Air - for free?

We want to show how much we love you all. This year, IxDA Berlin is giving away tickets to TOA for two of our beloved IxDAb’ites. To enter, sign up for our BBQ and send a tweet to us why you want to go to TOA this year. Winners will be announced via Twitter no later than Monday, July 11, 6pm.

We will see you at the party, drink and bite in hand!

Audrey, Jay, Thomas and Kathryn

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East meets West

Hey everybody,

IxDA Berlin is back! The topic for our next meeting is „East meets West“ and it is about technology, culture, yesterday, today - and tomorrow.

We are very pleased to be joined by Yang Liu, who is an award-winning designer, born in Beijing and now a professor and head of the department of communications design at the Berlin Technical Art University. Our second speaker is Silvia Lindtner, who is an assistant professor at the University of Michigan. Silvia’s research and teaching interests include transnational networks of innovation and entrepreneurship culture, making and hacking, science and technology studies in China, as well as internet and digital cultures.

As all activities of IxDA we aim to gather the community of interaction designers and all others interested in the field to mingle, learn from each other and push hot topics forward. Hang out, listen to awesome speakers, ask all your questions, and maybe even find a new job opportunity.

But definitely have fun, grab a delicious bite and a free drink (or three) - brought to you by our awesome sponsor Zalando!

We can’t wait to see and chat with you - see you there!

Thomas, Audrey, Kathryn and Jay

Cultural Differences

Yang Liu, Designer and Professor at Berlin Technical Art University

As we dig into the past, we can see that the foundations of art, history and language have played a large role in cultural differences within societies around the world.

As we move around the world from east to west, these cultural differences become a pillar of which each society bases much of their culture on. Gender, culture and time are all factors that play into how social differences are percieved and played out in design today, so how can we all work and design together?

Hacking China: Making as Entrepreneurial Life

Silvia Lindtner, University of Michigan

In this talk, drawing from ethnographic research spanning more than six years, Lindtner traces how a grassroots movement morphed within only five years into a high-stake sociopolitical project aimed at “hacking China”, i.e. opening up supply chains, revamping modes of industrial production for entrepreneurial intervention, and training workforces as creative and flexible knowledge workers.

She examines how the project of hacking China was propelled forward through a transnational imaginary that depicts making as ideally situated to address the pitfalls of the knowledge economy.

Contributing to a line of research invested in the cultural politics of design, global innovation discourse and technology production, Lindtner unpacks how making came to be seen as an intervention into the pitfalls of neoliberal governance by simultaneously critiquing and extending its very logic of self-reliance to include ever more diverse populations.

About our speakers

Yang Liu

Yang Liu was born in 1976 in Beijing. After studying at the University of Arts Berlin (UdK), she worked as a designer in Singapore, London, Berlin, and New York. In 2004 she founded her own design studio, which she continues to run today. In addition to holding workshops and lectures at international conferences, she has taught at numerous universities in Germany and abroad. In 2010 she was appointed a professor at the BTK University of Applied Sciences in Berlin.

Her works have won numerous prizes in international competitions and can be found in museums and collections all over the world. Yang Liu lives and works in Berlin.

Silvia Lindtner

Silvia Lindtner is an assistant professor at the University of Michigan in the School of Information, with a courtesy appointment in the Penny W. Stamps School of Art and Design. Lindtner’s research and teaching interests include transnational networks of innovation and entrepreneurship culture, DIY (do it yourself) making and hacking, science and technology studies in China, and Internet and digital cultures. She is currently writing a book on the culture and politics of “making” and transnational entrepreneurship in urban China. Her research has been awarded support from the US National Science Foundation, IMLS, Intel Labs, Google Anita Borg, and the Chinese National Natural Science Foundation. Her work has appeared at ACM SIGCHI, ACM CSCW (Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing), ST&HV (Science Technology & Human Values), Games & Culture, China Information, and other venues.

Lindtner is affiliated with several interdisciplinary centers and initiatives on campus including the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies, the Science, Technology and Society Program and the Michigan Interactive and Social Computing Research Group, and directs the Tech.Culture.Matters. Research Group. Together with Professor Anna Greenspan and David Li, Lindtner co-directs the Research Initiative Hacked Matter, dedicated to critically investigating processes of technology innovation, urban redesign, and maker-manufacturing cultures in China.

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