My story in design & technology – so far

What do you call someone able to code since 20 years, who studied design 15 years ago, lives digital and online since the same time frame, and can just learn new digital tools fast? I don't know, but I can solve digital problems — faster than many.

Code

It all started with coding. As a teenager I got from qBasic to Pascal to Delphi, then into the web with HTML/JS/CSS, some Perl to finally some PHP. While studying Mediadesign, Flash became a thing, so I learned ActionScript. And while doing my Master in Digital Design I jumped onto the Ruby on Rails train.

At work my ActionScript-KnowHow got deeper with Flex to create SEO-accessible Flash websites, and then some Test-Driven Rails Projects. The one excursion to Objective-C for an early simple iPhone-App didn't hold long, as you could do those with Flex.

Down the road I got into NodeJS, which seemed a nice fit for controlling LEDs, writing a little framework to so more quickly. At work NodeJS could be used for some custom Grunt-Plugins and cli-tools for boosting productivity. As JavaScript got more serious, I tried a little Angular 1.0, and after that, way more React + Redux including some Electron-Apps for productivity enhancement with Jira.

Design

This is what I actually learned. Coding feels natural, almost boring. But design is where it gets interesting. Studying at Mediadesign Hochschule in Munich, I learned typography, graphic theory, lay-outing, basic UX and could apply it to different kind of projects. "Dawn" was a fun way to cut little video-snippets into movies, just as YouTube was starting. "Fuehlraum" was an interactive installation as a team, where my Delphi skills got handy to read data from industrial laser-scanners into flash apps and dynamic music generation. And "Blogbook" was my thesis-project about the blogosphere and how it could be applied to a more graphic format, including thoughts about digital paper and touch interfaces.

To deepen my design knowhow I continued to study Digital Design at the Queensland College of Art in Brisbane. Most notably creation was an essay about the Web 2.0 and Political Opinion forming, foreshadowing what would soon later happen. I got my Master’s Degree and an Award for Academic Excellence.

Concept & iA

With basics covered in my design studies, quickly after joining my first full-time job, I got into concept work for corporate websites and intranets. Learning a lot from my colleagues — we developed a reusable approach to multi-dimensional navigation patterns. Using this we could quickly develop solutions for corporate customers with 7000+ content pages. The Basis for all of that was a thorough analysis of existing solutions, competing companies, user behavior and more. My main responsibilities where Data Analyst, Information Architect and Screendesigner. For the latter we started with wireframe prototypes to high fidelity designs.

Also, Presentation was a big part. The Key to deliver a great result in the end is to keep your client in the loop and make them understand why things the way they are. This not just helps them to agree on your proposals, but also to keep the concept working after taking over content creation.

Processes & IT

Living in both worlds of design and development can be frustrating. Watching Designers not able to talk to Developers and the other way around. They want the same, they just don't know how to communicate to each other. Before Responsive Web Design was a thing, it kind of worker not too bad. With Screen-designs including some specs it was not too difficult to create websites. But RWD changed a lot, the designers needed to know a lot more about floating, how to create designs for that and how to tell developers what they wanted. In short, this got me into developing processes, workflows and handoffs between those teams.

My role got more technical over time, the main reason was being able to quickly dive into new technical tools. Setting up Gitlab to enhance quality, create Grunt-Workflows for Multi-Theme creation, creating Docker Environments to enhance development speed, using creating Controlled Live Deployments with Jenkins to reduce downtime and bad-times where just the more prominent examples of that.

Product Management

At my second firm I was able to apply my conceptional know-how at product management. I was working on around 40 OXID modules, doing release management, documentation, and concepts for new features or modules. Those products were mainly created to enhance development-speed of eCommerce projects and being used for marketing purposes. Over time, we merged the most used ones into a shop-starter product, which saved us weeks in mundane project work and opened the possibility for more complex and advanced shops. Defining Scope, tracking progress and saying no to one-project-features where among my core responsibilities.

Art Projects

It was Burning Man's fault. Before that, I never thought about "art", it used to be something in museums and galleries — not something I can do in my spare time. Burning Man, more precisely its younger sibling Nowhere, changed that mindset forever. Art can be approachable and can be done by anyone. Also, it doesn't need to be "high-art" to be worth doing it. So from 2013 I started doing LED-based projects in Europe with my brother Luke. Those got bigger and more complex over time. And in 2017 I was part of the Shrine of Lost Moments 2017 Team, responsible for Construction and LED-Lightning, which continued one year later in Africa Shrine of Lost Moments 2018. The Shrines where the moment when the projects evolved from just being a fun interactive LED thing, to have a deeper dimension. If it makes you laugh, think or cry, it's probably good. COVID-19 meant no burns and that's a big bummer for doing art projects, but new ways and ideas will come.

Team Lead

If you want more, you'll end up in management

is something Abby Covert explained beautifully in 2020.

My professional story got me into similar situations. After my tech-talent sucked me into IT stuff, it was not that easy to get out of there to do again more design. In 2017/18 I chose the management route and became Team-lead for a new Team called "UIUX". Forget that name, it was about bringing Frontend-Development (4 people) and one Designer together, find a common language and make faster better projects in the future. I didn't do much IT anymore, but quickly I also didn't do design or code, I ended up doing primarily management.

It worked (and still does). Design and Frontend can speak to each other and reduce unnecessary friction to a minimum. Why some friction is good, is another topic.

Also, within the first year the team grew from 5 to 11 members till the people management part got eventually too much time-consuming. After about two years Design became independent again, and I helped the frontend team to do the same, before continuing my journey.

And now?

The journey continues and at its heart emerges a philosophy about design, technology, concepts, ethics and how it all connects to each other.