I’m Johannes. I create concepts and strategies at IXDS and I lead teams of designers and engineers to make new technologies
useful for people. As a designer by heart, curiosity drives me forward, 10 years of experience taught me patience.
I want to go open source professionally.
In the past, I’ve worked with IXDS to help Wikimedia create productive collaboration formats for Mapping OER. As an intern at Mediamatic in Amsterdam, I went for an autograph of Jimmy Wales.
It is not technology what makes the most admirable achievement of Wikipedia for me but motivating people of all kinds to join forces and work on a truely global effort. Design practice knows a lot of methods to get involved with users, understand their motivations, and prototype working solutions – doing so in the open, in and with the community becomes truly participatory design.
Open source software can be notorious for being hard to understand and use – which severly hampers its success. It should excel in user experience, as many projects are rooted in and driven by communities! And Wikimedia has the power and community size to make a difference. Designing solutions that find community acceptance is no easy task but an important goal that I want to pour my energies into; carefully yet persistently.
Design can make tools more useable. It also offers important insights for strategic decisions with its user perspective and a cross-sectional view of a “product” or service. Its hands-on nature lets you break down high level topics into tangible experiments again to gain real world feedback quickly. I want to help leverage design powers throughout Wikimedia.
The mission of Wikipedia requires many different skills – working across disciplines is a challenge but mainly an opportunity for me. During my time supporting Mapping OER with IXDS, I experienced a highly supportive and dynamic atmosphere in the core team. This culture of mutual respect seems to fuel Wikimedia and I’d love to contribute and grow in it.
I work best in teams and embrace the mix of disciplines. With 7+ years of experience, I enjoy supporting them to meet their goals and ensure fluent communication with everyone else involved (e.g. clients, sponsors, other teams).
Innovation needs to happen. Not only as systematic research but also realized and tested to evaluate a novel solution. Applying and adapting design tools to combine user needs, business goals, and technical possibilities has been my main job focus so far and I truely like it.
Tools for private and professional use are merging. My last couple of years working on smart manufacturing and industrial topics got me deep insights into RoI considerations and (IoT) platform strategies – while I pushed to move “the user” up on the priority list of management.
We built IXDS up from 0 to over 80 employees, including non-conventional defaults like the 4-days workweek. Thinking about organizational development and (sometimes painful) learning has become a natural thing to me. Also, because my dedication to my job doesn’t end with a given task, I look ahead and try to learn from the past.
I don’t believe that innovations ending in business secrets and “customer lifetime value” are helping to advance our knowledge and empower every individual. I’m passionate about my job and that leaves little room for side projects – now I don’t want to tranquilize my passion for open source any longer and make it my professional default.
Most of my work I can’t show because it’s based on closed innovation. Luckily, there are some open projects that also made me realize that I want to go fully “open innovation”.
How to teach first-time users about privacy features and how make it an attractive exploration?
Software + ecosystem for makers to build electronic circuits
Support a diverse community in defining status quo and worthwhile projects for open educational ressources.
Can service design and UX help innovate on the factory shop floor? – talk at SDNglobal 2106
Three directions for how design can improve people’s authority over their personal data. – IXDS PreWorkTalk 2015
If you are interested in the approach and processes I know inside out, the IXDS website has some descriptions for you.
I’ve spent most of my professional life with IXDS, but I also allowed myself some detours.
2008 – 2015
From the humble beginnings, I helped build up IXDS as a recognized design office for digital transformation of over 80 people. We work on huge range of topics from strategy to implementation.
Quick growth and a constantly evolving company demands a lot of energy. But shaping my organization and workplace has always been a great opportunity for me.
2015 – 2017
For this new „hub“ of expertise focused on digital industrial and enterprise projects, I helped build up clients and strategy.
It is an engineering driven world but the success of a service depends on how it works in the hands & eyes of workers on the shop floor. Plus, while doing user research, I could walk around these fascinating machines!
from 2017
2004
As part of the design team, I worked with pen&pencil and the HTML stack to create web portals based on semantic web technology (anymeta).
I wanted to catch the Dutch design spirit as part of my studies and found myself deeply immersed into culture, technology, and a company remodelling. The borders between all of them and business can be fluent.
2008 – 2009
We built this open source software also as a tool for ourselves, to merge electronics, software, and the creative impulse of making.
Don’t educate! Event though Fritzing is also about learning. Encourage people to build their projects, provide support where necessary, and boost their energy.
2013
In a multidisciplinary research team, we explored visual tools to help network security analyst detect threats in network traffic data more effectively.
The co-creative methods that we applied felt rather new for most researchers – this way, co-creative methods in data visualization became the focus for our research paper.
More details? My
linkedin profile gives you a more complete overview.
My scientific work is available via Research Gate.
I hope you enjoyed the read. But for working together, nothing beats a personal conversation. Get in touch!
PGP Fingerprint:
235E 733C 9943 A473 06B6 08B4 7D58 A288 7698 BC87
Thanks Philipp Sackl for sharing his path to Mozilla so openly – it makes a lot of sense and was a great motivation and inspiration (obviously).
I’m also grateful for the work I could build upon thanks to creative commons:
Gemma Evans via the noun project, cc-by 3.0
Jasmine Rae Friedrich via the noun project, cc-by 3.0
Dimitry Sunseifer via the noun project, cc-by 3.0
Adapted from Arif Fajar Yulianto via the noun project, cc-by 3.0
Wikimedia Foundation Logo, adapted from Neolux (SVG version created by DarkEvil, revised by Philip Ronan and optimized by Zscout370 and Artem Karimov) Later revised by Wikimedia Foundation. CC BY-SA 3.0
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Lützner, Goltz, Atelier Disko, cc-by 4.0
Anne Deppe for IXDS