My good friend Emma makes organic, raw, vegan, fair-trade chocolate. Her companies name is Zimt. I did some work on her logo and also re-designed her packaging. Honestly, this is the best chocolate in the world! You have got to try it! Buy it at Whole Foods in Canada or online: www.zimt.ca
Category: PORTFOLIO
Simon Fraser University, SIAT, PHD student work, Research Assistant, Spring 2012, Summer 2012
In my first three terms as a Ph.D. student at SIAT I had a cooperative Research Assistantship with Dr. Brian Fisher and Dr. Ron Wakkary. I worked in the field of Interaction Design and Visual Analytics (VA) for Emergency Management.
We observed the entire planning process of the emergency management planning of the City of Vancouver for the “Celebration of Lights” event in the summer. We looked at the process from a design perspective and then looked into discovering and articulating challenges that could be addressed in future research. We collected and documented a lot of data to the Visual Analytics group at SIAT.
I worked in collaboration with SIAT student Sara Salevati on this project.
Simon Fraser University, SIAT, PHD student work, Research Assistant, Fall 2011
In my first three terms as a Ph.D. student at SIAT I had a cooperative Research Assistantship with Dr. Brian Fisher and Dr. Ron Wakkary. I worked in the field of Interaction Design and Visual Analytics (VA) for Emergency Management. Through ethnographic observations during the GreyCup activations of the Vancouver Emergency Operation Center (EOC) I started prototyping a VA tool for Situational Awareness with the consideration of integrating social media as a source of information. The tool presented scenarios of how to present and interact with situational reports that are pulled together through gathered information from multiple sources, including social media.
We presented a poster about this research at ISCRAM2012 (Integrative and Analytical Approaches to Crisis Response and Emergency Management Information Systems).
vvvv development and 360° VJ performance with and for Cocoon Club Frankfurt, HfG Schwäbisch Gmünd -Interaction Design, Summer 2011.
Project guidance: Sabrina Hauser & Andreas Brendle | Project partner: Ivo Schüssler, Eno Henze, Ömer Erol
Students: Roman Grasy, Markus Lorenz Schilling, Jan Barth, Armin Kröner, Patric Sterrantino, Sofia Hnatiuk, Marcel Müller, Antonio Krämer Fernandez, David Abele, Phillipp Hogg, Adrian Abele.
(Music in the video: Tree Elves – Fortitude – Original Mix)
I initiated and guided this project of developing new visuals for the 360° projection wall system of the Cocoon Club in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. The clubs unique realtime-system is build on a network-setup with 21 projectors and 22 computers running an early version of the VJ System IRIS which is based on vvvv, a graphical programming environment.
During a three-month time period, the project team created 20 different patches (vvvv-applications) in several workshops and implemented them into the clubs system. Each patch has different parameters which can be controlled in realtime using IRIS.
Finally, the group performed on a friday night event as VJs at the Cocoon Club showing their results.
Hochschule für Gestaltung (HfG) Schwäbisch Gmünd. February – July 2011. Lead of the project.
This project was done during my employment at the HfG. The school was in the need of an efficient schedule- and room-planning system. An academic assistant had been doing all the scheduling and planning in Adobe inDesign without any software helping with logic, issues etc! It was a very nerve-wrecking job to do over the summer. I felt I had to put my information science skills to use and help out.
I did a thorough research of different software options and settled for a collaboration with a company that had a product for high schools. It fit best with all the needs and wants we had at the HfG in terms of scheduling lecturers and Professors that are only available at certain times, because they are working in industry half of their time. My information science skills were extremely useful for this project. I lead this collaboration.
The implementation and all the work towards it took about 5 months and turned out to be a great success. The system is still in use.
In Spring 2011 I taught the course “Project Management for Designers” to Bachelor of Arts students of the Interaction Design and Communication Design program at the HfG Schwaebisch Gmuend. All together I taught this course three times.
In this course I gave lectures on:
1. Self-management. Being organized on an everyday basis as a designer; tipps and tricks.
2. Project Management. Theoretical background, methods, skills, and tools.
3. Project Management in Design Practice. Design process, work and self-organisation in design practice, applying project management methods in design practice.
4. Project planning applied with an example.
5. Collaborative work with the support of tools.
Students received practical assignments throughout the course, which were all put together in a documentation and submitted at the end. Assignments were on:
1. Self-management
2. Time-management
3. Work environment organization
4. Importance of project management for design.
5. Creating a project milestones plan and a project structure plans
6. Try using a project management software like GanttProject
7. Filing structures for design projects
8. Plan a project with the tools learnt (they got to pick an everyday event for this.)
The goal was to get design students (early in their careers) thinking about their work organization, observe and analyze themselves, and develop an understanding of how to be organized and efficient as a designer. Moreover, an aim was to have students students know about project management skills and tools and learn how they can be useful in design practice. See two examples of a student’s documentation with all assignments HERE and HERE.
I designed a few posters for while working at HfG. Some of them for example for Wednesday Seminars, events for which guest speakers are invited to come in and give a talk in the afternoon. They’re great! Another example is a bilingual poster I crafted about the interaction design study program. Poster design wasn’t a part of my job, but more a fun thing to do for me.
In fall 2010 I taught the course “Corporate Communications – a Part of Corporate Identities” to Master of Science students of the Information Science and Engineering program at the Hochschule Darmstadt.
In this course I taught about communication, perception, seeing companies as personalities/identities/corporate identities, and strategic communication.
See our Syllabus, a draft of my lecture planning, my slides (1), (2), (3), (4), practical task briefs (1), (2), (3). Unfortunately, this is all in German.
Besides attending my lectures, the students had to pick a company they would target a communication strategy at. First they had to do an analysis and create fact sheets and creative briefings about their chosen companies. Second they had to create creative briefings for strategic communication work. Third they had to pick a part of a stretegic develop a changed strategic communications plan. Everything was presented in a final pechakucha event.
See a full documentation of one student HERE.
When I was working at the HfG, I also got be involved in mentoring students. Daniel Utz taught the course “Interactive Communication Systems” to 2nd year Interaction Design Students and I helped him mentor the project teams (7 teams of 3-4 students) as a teaching assistance.
This dates back quite a bit and the project wiki from this course has been updated. But HERE are similar projects from the same course, from when it was taught more recently; and THIS PROJECT is a good example with an english video. Students can chose to do either a more physical/hardware design project or a software application project. The aim is to communicate information through a designed interactive system. Such systems can often be found in museums. In the beginning workload has to go into an information analysis before design phases start.
[Featured Image of this post taken from Flickr.]
Hochschule für Gestaltung (HfG) Schwäbisch Gmünd. Spring, Summer 2010. Supervised by: Prof. Hans Krämer
This project was done during my employment at the HfG. The school was in the need of an efficient schedule- and room-planning system. Up until that time an academic assistant had done all the scheduling and planning in inDesign and without any software helping with logic, issues etc!
I worked on developing an information system that was supposed to be used for the universities schedule and room planning. Among other abilities, the system exports its information through different channels such as terminal displays, that will be located on different sites on campus, personalized schedules in common formats that can be downloaded and email information services. Through the process of that project, I monitored the different user-groups and conceited the system along with its information structure. After implementing the database, Markus Lorenz Schilling as a Research Assistant and I developed the graphical user interface.
Unfortunately, the system was never realized; costs ended up being too high. However, I did end up finding a system on the market used in secondary schools, that worked for the HfG and was in a leading position organizing the implementation of it in 2011. That system is still in use.