Hello Wikimedia!
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.
Why I Go For Wikimedia
Design for Thriving Communities
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.
Make Great UX a Signature of Open Source
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 as Support for Strategy
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.
Diversity & Team Spirit
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.
Where I Worked & Learned
I’ve spent most of my professional life with IXDS, but I also allowed myself some detours.
Designer & Team Lead
IXDS
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.
Design Lead
Smart Manufacturing
IXDS
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!
Design Intern
Mediamatic
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.
UX Designer
Fritzing
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.
DataVis Researcher
FH Potsdam IDL
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.
And Now: Let’s Talk
I hope you enjoyed the read. But for working together, nothing beats a personal conversation. Get in touch!
mail@emotisys.de
PGP Fingerprint:
235E 733C 9943 A473 06B6 08B4 7D58 A288 7698 BC87
Credits / cc-by
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:

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