When I tell people that I build physical prototypes (a.k.a things with knobs, displays, and wires, which demonstrate how physical user interfaces of products that are going to get built will work) they usually smile, often sadly, and say: „Yes, but that’s easy for you since you are such a nerd.“

That’s of course a grand misconception. Of me (probably) and the general situation as a whole. People still believe that extensive programming and electrical engineering skills are needed, but that is no longer true. The nerd barrier has been torn down in quite a few places.

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The avid and attentive reader of this blog might have noticed another (silent) relaunch of my blog – the giveaway was the change of design.

This is the result of aspirations meeting reality. As I mentioned before, I wanted to use a small and lightweight engine for this blog and say goodbye to the behemoth called WordPress. Back in September I picked Kirby, since it ticked all the boxes. I bought a license and a decent theme, and loved the fact that I could now write my posts in markup and simply upload the files to the server.

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Vor ca. zehn Jahren, als Produktivität noch etwas war worüber man bloggte (und prodcutivity p0rn noch kein Begriff war), stieß ich eines Tages auf David Seahs Blog. Dort teilte und schrieb er regelmäßig über selbstgemachte Productivity Templates. Mein Favorit war damals (und ist es übrigens immer noch) der compact calendar, ein einfacher, und wie der Name sagt, kompakter Jahreskalender.

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“Umwege erhöhen die Ortskenntnis” (detours expand local knowledge) was a common saying of my philosophy professor after he went on a tangent during class.

I love the saying and I know the feeling pretty well – it frequently happens to me when I start to get interested in a topic. I start to research something, then I notice another interesting aspect, then another, and then another, and then… I guess you can see a pattern there. It’s similar to the process Dory experiences when she is trying to do something in Finding Nemo.

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About four months ago Alexa moved in with me. She’s a quiet but witty flatmate. She connected with my WiFi speaker, immediately. Yes, she is a real tech geek. Soon she took over music and radio management for my place.

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My last task at Deutsche Telekom Design was to create and set up its Design Thinking program. The goal was (to negotiate and) to establish a company-wide Design Thinking practice.

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Five years ago, in 2012, I released a small e-book on the Amazon Kindle platform called Axure for Mobile. At that time Axure 6.5 was just released, offering quite a few enhancements for mobile prototyping (swiping events, the mobile settings panel, etc.). My book described these new features and offered quite a few hacks which made mobile prototyping way easier.

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I just had an exacerbation (a word I just barely managed to google, due to my dire state). For the uninformed: man flu is a chronic disease which inevitably leads to death.

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Warning: German ahead.

Ich höre viel deutsche Musik und das ist immer mal wieder schwierig.
Nicht wegen des Hörens an sich, sondern wegen des Missverständnisses, das entsteht, wenn ich davon erzähle. Denn das Radiogedudel mit den tollen einfachen Botschaften und der super guten Laune meine ich nicht. Sondern diese andere deutsche Musik.

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