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.

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.

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.

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.

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 serve (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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