We are in the process of organizing the next upcoming IxDA local chapter gathering in Düsseldorf, Germany. I have touched base with people from Grey and Sapient and we are hoping to spread the word more virally this time. We have yet to decide where it will take place, though it will certainly be downtown again. I have already set up a mixxt community for the meetings for people to touch base more easily. I will provide the link when we will announce the location and date.

See you around the next IxDA local chapter meeting.

I need to confess, I do love this speech by Tina Seelig. In fact, I do sort of remember her speech from back in 2006. In the meantime she was approached by Harper in order to write about her speech and the idea behind it. Its highly inspirational and indeed motivational as well.

Here you will find the major points from her rough speech in 2006 which actually guided her recent one at Stanford’s Technology Ventures Program.

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1) Every problem is an opportunity for a creative solution. Attitude is everything and you control your attitude. The bigger the problem, the bigger the opportunity. No one will pay you to solve a non-problem. Tina has some great examples of a money-making challenge she gave to a bunch of her students. They’re fun to listen to because they so clearly demonstrate how easily we can go beyond our self-limiting constraints.

2) The harder you work, the luckier you get. You need to put yourself in a position to make yourself lucky.

3) Find the intersection between your interests, your skills, and the market. “Follow your passions” is a cop-out piece of advice. Passions are necessary, but not sufficient. For years I beat myself up for not understanding what my passions were enough to follow them. Remember “Do what you love, the money will come”? It doesn’t often work that way. You need to find something you enjoy that other people want so you can get paid!

4) Try lots of things and keep what works. About risk taking and being willing to fail. If you aren’t failing sometimes, you aren’t taking enough risks. When I first learned how to water ski at age 14, I bragged to one of the instructors that I had made it around the lake without falling down. He replied, “if you aren’t falling down, you’re not trying hard enough.”

5) You don’t have to wait to be anointed. Write your own business card. Don’t wait for someone to tell you that you are ready for the next level. You do the job and then you get the job. Entrepreneurs don’t wait for others to empower them. They empower themselves. My favorite business cards are the ones for my own businesses, the ones I created for myself.

6) Don’t burn bridges. There are only 50 people in the world, the rest are wall paper. You are going to bump into these people over and over and over again.This is painfully true.

7) You can do it all, just not all at the same time. Know your priorities. Change them regularly.

8) It’s the little things that matter most. Look people in the eye. Sit up straight. Write a thank you note within 24 hours of having a job interview.Another one is “respond to all emails within 24 hours, preferably within a few hours.” That one’s the hardest for me.

9) When you are a team, the key is making everybody else successful. The more you make other people around you successful, the more it comes back to you, many many many fold. You can tell when you are working with a great team, because everyone helps each other be successful. The non-team players are the ones who take, but don’t give.

10) Never miss an opportunity to be fabulous. This is not a dress rehearsal. If you are not going to do your best work now, when are you going to? Excellent advice. Why be just good if you can be great?

Link to STVP

I came across a nice post about selling your services/skills to clients or peers. Although it was mainly meant to convey attributes of a great sales person in regard to UX Design, the list summarizes atttributes and skills more broadly. Speaking in front of an audience is an aspect of selling yourself, your idea or business and its actually more scary for people than death itself.

Here it comes:

• Are passionate about what they are selling - they love the subject matter and when they talk about it, you feel embraced by their energy. You want to be around them.
• Are informed and current - they are people who are reading up on the latest and greatest and like to share their knowledge.
• Communicate clearly - they know how to get to the heart or sweet spot of what they are selling so people can understand it. They avoid jargon.
• Are honest - they don’t make stuff up and if they don’t know the answer to a question, they say “I don’t know”. But they do find out and its their honesty that helps them form stronger relationships with the people they meet.
• Are focused - they stick to a few ideas or concepts and find ways to explain these clearly to people they meet.
• Have real goals - these may be sales goals i.e how much stuff they want to sell, but may also be larger goals that pertain to growing a community of interest, bringing people together, getting themselves and people around them motivated to do more.
• Are trustworthy - people trust them and have networks of trust. So when they introduce people to other people in their network, there is an inherent trust and value in those connections.
• Are connected - they know people who can help other people. They value and protect their network. They do not network for the sake of networking, handing out hundreds of business cards. Nor do they grow their network for the sake of growing their network.
• Go beyond and reach out - they go beyond comfort zones, their own communities, reach out and think about things holistically.
• Are open source - they don’t shut down ideas or people. They are open to ideas to help inform their own ideas. They create environments where people feel comfortable to express their needs, concerns, excitement towards something more than themselves.
• Are storytellers - they like to tell stories to help make people understand concepts towards their sales goals. They engage.
• Know when to speak and when to shut up - they know when to present a story and when to listen and learn. Yes, there are times when you don’t have to be the one shouting the loudest in the room.
• Tweak and learn (repeat) - they know how to pilot their story and continually improve it along the way. They know the way you sell now will probably change in the next year. The tools you use to tell a story will probably also change as the business and social landscape changes too.
• Are human - they are able to be themselves and make others feel comfortable too. They are able to make fun of themselves and also know that its OK to make mistakes. That its OK to fail.

For more details, esp interesting for designers, please see the post of Daniel Szuc

German Leon and myself kicked off the IxDA local gathering yesterday evening. We did choose the Bazzar Café for our first meetup. It did work out really well, we gathered around plenty of people at that really nice, cozy and authentic café bar downtown Düsseldorf. We have not been able to attract folks from Cologne, though I would assume that was due to the timing and distance. However, we might choose to head down to Cologne for our second meetup in about two months.

Anyhow, we happened to have a really interesting discussion about the purpose of those local IxDA meetups. From an organization point of view, IxDA wants to foster a community of people that choose to come together to support the intention of advancing and improving the human condition which is challenged by poor experiences. IxDA relies on individual initiative, contribution and sharing. The discussion went way further by actually pointing at the distinction between Interaction Design and User Experience. As you may have noticed, I have written “challenged by poor experiences” - this would point to the notion of Experience Design rather than to Interaction Design in particular. By accident, this discussion was a major topic being discussed at the UXcamp 09 in Berlin last weekend. At the end of the discussion among a whole bunch of people from several professions (though mainly the same industry) the main thread was not precisely nailed down. The consensus tended toward User Experience Design as the major description of what everbody does on a daily basis, and Interaction Design just being a smaller aspect or contributor to the whole experience. Although the discurs yesterday was rather short in contrast to the one at UXcamp09 we ended up getting to the same conclusion, though lacking some action points for everybody act upon. This was different to UXcamp. People started to post and blog about the discurs and its major outcome. From a long term perspective this this will be a valid and necessary development for and within the industry.
Just for the sake of a contrary argument, people at both events became conserned that the term User Experience Design will be quite a lot tougher to sell as a holistic service to potential clients or industries.

Ted leads the interaction design practice for Smart Design. The teams focuses on designing novel and appealing interactions for a wide range of consumer electronics. Interaction designers at Smart work closely with industrial designers, design researchers, and mechanical and electrical engineers to create enjoyable and satisfying consumer experiences.

He worked at Motorola’s Enterprise Mobility Group before heading to Smart. He got to Motorola through an aquisition of Symbol Technologies. Ted actually did not study Design initially - it was actually International Relations. However, he completed his design degree at IIT back in 1998 when the Internet kind of got traction and became more popular.

He travels between the US and Europe and currently works with his team for Fortune 500 companies.

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Download: Show 016 / Ted Booth / Smart Design / NYC

I have been talking to Frans Joziasse from PARK Design Manangement recently. They have been working with e.g. LEGO for some time as well as for plenty of other big european companies. However, I am in the process of post-production. Since I have bought new software, I am able to streamline the entire process. Hence, the shows will be published a little sooner.

The show with Smart founder Tom Dair is almost ready to go live. Though, I will publish the interview with Ted Booth of Smart Design New York before hand. Please stay tuned.

I have not been able to use my GReader for a few days now. Just recently I did browse through my tech feeds entirely. What was interesting yet a little funny, there have been about 3-4 stories about “Who shall buy Twitter”. Since I track major tech sites via RSS, one thing is certain. Those stories have been published by nerds. However, the more twitter acquisition stories pop up the lesser there is truth and uniqueness to it. Does those writers really care why it would make sense for either Apple or Amazon do buy Twitter and its social graph? Do they know how their very own business model would be supported by the one of Twitter (if there is any at all). It feels a lot more like buzzing up Twitter in order to get acquired. And certainly it feels like the very own founders have long came to an end in searching for a valid and competitive business model.

Please find the link to each story below.

Business Insider - Gawker Media - TechCrunch

It has been quite calm for some time now. I have not been able to publish any new shows on the envisiond podcast.

However, as you can see I am working on new projects now. (which actually does not mean I am stopping podcasting though). I am working on a couple of business ideas which will eventually be incorporated. Those project will be developed under the name incubaker.
With a great friend of mine, I have initiated an IxDA local chapter in Düsseldorf which will be hosted bimonthly.
I have touched base recently with the Mobile Monday guys and talked about possible collaborations and extensive support for the MOMO Düsseldorf.

I just got an email from a IIT fellow about this interesting class held by Donald Norman. Please “sneak in” and enjoy.

“Waiting lines are a necessary evil, they have a deep business aspect behind them”

Don Norman is a Professor at Northwestern University, co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Group, and former Vice President of Apple Computer. He serves on many advisory boards, including Encyclopedia Britannica and the Industrial design department of KAIST, the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. He was awarded the Benjamin Franklin medal in Computer and Cognitive Science. He has honorary degrees from the University of Padova (Italy) and the Technical University Delft (the Netherlands) and is the author of “The Design of Everyday Things” and “Emotional Design.” His newest book, “The Design of Future Things,” discusses the role that automation plays in our everyday lives. He lives at www.jnd.org.

Video: The Design of Future Things (678MB mp4)

Audio: The Design of Future Things (64MB)

”Change has a considerable psychological impact on the human mind. To the fearful it is threatening because it means that things may get worse. To the hopeful it is encouraging because things may get better. To the confident it is inspiring because the challenge exists to make things better.“ (King Whitney Jr.)