Workshop at Hochschule für Gestaltung Schwäbisch Gmünd
Once again we traveled to Hochschule für Gestaltung Schwäbisch Gmünd to give a 1,5 days workshop to master students. It’s around 7 hours on the train, but we always use the time to reflect on various topics and work on latest workshop preparations. This time, it felt like traveling into another country: the trees in Southern Germany were already green and it was a lot warmer. So we had dinner outside on both evenings in Schwäbisch Gmünd, a rather gemütlich smalltown.

Our workshop there is on multiscreen-device design (we moved away from “screen” and started talking about “device”). As we prefer to actually make stuff and take most of the time to sketch and discuss digital product ideas with our students, we decided to apply what we had just learned in our Design Studio training with Todd a week earlier. And although everybody was quite challenged by the workshop pace in the beginning, we felt that all participants really appreciated the approach: they threw out so many ideas and sketches, and patiently went through a dozen rounds of sketching, pitching and critique. For us it was really exciting to observe how their product ideas, but mainly the group dynamics became better and better with every iteration.

Fostering and growing
Spring is always a good time of the year to prepare your garden for summertime – and to discuss next steps for your company! Since we’re adding a few people to the team within the next few months, we actually need to define a certain framework. We have a pretty clear picture in mind and a shared understanding of what we want the precious design studio to be and to become (and what we don’t want!), but putting it into words and being able to convey this mindset to new people is something else. Our beloved friend and new studio manager Svenja is helping us laying out plans and tactics to foster and grow our vision of a fully transparent, non-hierarchical and highly participatory company culture. There won’t be a masterplan anytime soon, but there won’t be a better moment to try things out. As Johannes once wrote: developing the company is the toughest design project to work on – and we need to experiment and iterate on that as well.

Teenage Engineering
Jan showed up the other day and had a magic piece of music hardware in his backpack: the OP-1 by Teenage Engineering. He gave a short demo and I was even more taken with it afterwards. These guys really have created something mind-blowingly unique and fun.

Project inquiries
We have a lot of pretty thrilling project inquiries in the pipeline these days. That’s fantastic and we’re very thankful, but it also means we’ll have to reject a few of them. Same goes for some talk and workshop requests. Turning down promising opportunities is always a painful thing, so that’s one of the reasons why we’re adding a few people to the team.

#rp13
This week we traveled to Berlin for two days of re:publica. We enjoyed the conference as guests this year – having worked on the design in 2011 and 2012. Entering the conference terrain was a goosebumps moment: it felt so good coming back to STATION Berin after a full year – we had such a good and intense time there back in May 2012. It was great seeing all the lovely people of the re:publica team again, talking to our dear raumlabor friends, hanging around for two days and being able to listen to a few talks. And the cappuccino was delicious again!

It was also very interesting and inspiring to see what this year’s designers 10hoch16 came up with. They’re great people and we chatted about a broad range of topics – working with re:publica, running a design studio, changing the world … I think we should work together on something, sometime.

Svenja started as our first ever studio manager and she got more stuff done in her first few days than we did in half a year. Unfortunately her stint will be just two months, because she has got another summer job. We already miss her.

On Tuesday we hosted our first public event at the studio. Todd Zaki Warfel talked about prototyping and ideation techniques. We had some concerns to open our precious space to 50 people, some of who we never seen before, but everything went just fine. We’ve had a great evening, I hope our guests felt the same.

The next day Todd trained our team and some friends in the Design Studio Methodology. We applied the process to generate and refine ideas for a fictitious product and learned how to moderate such sessions with clients.

These are just the facts. A lot more could be said, but not today.

This week:

- Michael is building a tool that we’ll use for our Design Studio Methodology workshop next week. We also hope to make it public very soon.

- Christophe made drastic changes to the overall layout of Puichon. Together with Inken he moderated a workshop with the inhouse designers of Conuma at our studio.

- I made quite a few iterations for a ubiquitous platform feature of Puichon and took care of some admin stuff.

- David took the week off.

Yesterday we’ve had a conversation about the strategic alignment of the company. We talked about what kind of projects we want to do in the future and how to evaluate new inquiries from clients. That was the easy part.
Trying to unveil the DNA of precious was much harder. We all have an idea of what our design studio is and is not. But if you dig really deep and trying to break it down to just a few basic characteristics, it’s tough work. Formulating and communicating this is even harder. Definitely too much for the limited time we’ve set aside for our meeting, so we have to continue next week.

It’ll be interesting to see how that will influence the structure and atmosphere of the room. Because of the wood glue, the olfactory impression was as prominent as the visual. I’m not sure if the emissions made us high, dizzy or tired.

Either way I couldn’t detect a change – positive or negative – in our productivity. We’ve been busy as usual with Puichon and Conuma. For the latter Michael developed a nifty sketch of a tool that semi-automates the production of teasers (if you aren’t fluent in marketing-lingo: a combination of image and text that should animate the user to click). That lead to some thoughts and discussions about “rule-based art direction”, a really fascinating topic that seems to come back to us again and again.

Here’s a few more things I remember:
We had some talks about new project opportunities. Interesting.
We interviewed some applicants. Promising.
Michael made a chocolate-beetroot cake for my birthday. Mouth-watering.

We talked about how to manage such complex design projects, how to keep a living, evolving styleguide up-to-date without slowing down the whole process, without making to many mistakes, and ultimately without losing our sanity. We don’t have a solution yet, just some ideas how it would work in an ideal world. A world which is radically different, vaster and less confined than the little island called Creative Suite.

On Thursday we had our first “precious film club” night. We watched “The Ghost of Piramida”, a documentary by Andreas Koefoed. The film maker joined Danish band Efterklang to Spitsbergen, where they recorded sounds for their new record in an abandoned russian mining town. The second narrative of the film is about a former citizen of this town, Piramida, who recalls the short, but interesting history of this russian outpost. Koefoed managed to interweave these two very different plots into a beautiful collage which I hardly can put into words. Watch it, if what I described sparks a little bit of interest. You won’t regret it.

Our job offers have brought about quite a few applications. We are still reviewing them, but there are already some promising ones (if you could imagine working with us, it’s never to late to send your application).

As usual we worked on our two long-term projects we are currently involved. Actually there’s not much I could say about it, so I rather talk about Issaquah. It’s the first project for a bigger client where David took over the responsibility for the visual design and presented his drafts to the client directly. I only had a look at it once a week and gave a little feedback when requested, but other than that, Christophe and I had nothing to do with it. To say it turned out better than expected may sound like we had our doubts about David handling the job well. That’s not the case, we were quite certain that he was able to do it. But now that the project is almost done on our part, I’m very happy with the result. And so is the client. Thinking about that I just counted how long David has been with us, since he started as an intern. Only 15 months!

While Christophe is on a well-deserved vacation in Mexico (some impressions here), the rest of us is still waiting for the first signs of spring. Maybe week 380 will bring some warmer air and a little bit of sun.

David and Michael worked together on Issaquah. David has skipped Photoshop for this project and gives Sketch a real-life test-drive, at least for the chrome elements (header, navigation, etc) of this hybrid app. Most of the design however is about displaying text contents, which will be rendered with HTML/CSS in the final product. So Michael and David do the whole design for these parts with with web technologies and its original material. No deceiving simulation in graphics software with fake content – let’s get real!

Christophe and I spent the first half of week doing layout specifications for Puichon. The process of developing the design foundations over the course of the last 6 months was pretty agile (sometimes it even felt erratic to us). And because of the enormous scale and the fast pace of the project, it got a bit messy – since the visual language and the layouts developed constantly across three different devices (tablet, mobile, web), it was about time to take a few days to consolidate and homogenize the design, as well as establish rules for its implementation.

As usual Christophe spent the rest of the week on Conuma. He promised to demo the status quo in our next weekly all hands meeting.

We also launched a little thingy called “Design Position Generator” on Friday. If you need a fancy title for your business card, take this short and fun survey. If you could imagine that this business card has our logo and address on it, have a look at this.

We’re very happy and excited to announce that in April, Todd Zaki Warfel from San Francisco will be visiting precious design studio. In an all-day workshop, he’ll train our team and some friends in the Design Studio Methodology.

Todd is the author of the Rosenfeld Media book Prototyping: A Practitioner’s Guide. You might have heard of him in a great article series about Design Studio on UX Magazine – if not, make sure to read it.

A day before our workshop, Todd will give a talk and will be available for Q&A. Here’s the date and location for now, we’ll publish more details soon:

11. April 2013
precious design studio, Völckersstrasse 14-20, 22765 Hamburg

We’re looking forward to meet you! Please follow @preciousforever on Twitter for updates or get in touch if you have any questions. This event will be presented by IxDA.

We took a little time out from Puichon, the project that kept most of us quite busy in the last months and especially in the week before. A lot of different things had been filling up our backlogs and it was about time to tackle some of them. From boring, but inevitable duties like accounting, to the important tasks of talent scouting or new challenges like organizing a workshop and lecture (more on that soon).

Conuma continued in the usual rhythm. Christophe had a lot of meetings (3 in a day) with the client, its team members and contractors.

David started working on a new project, Issaquah. It’s a tablet/mobile app and it has something to do with the news.

That was week 376.

Actually, there’s no reason to be worried. What we experienced this month and what made me so unhappy was nothing dramatic. I guess most people in similar situations would consider it business as usual (which doesn’t make it any better though).

Were the last two weeks more enjoyable? Not really… but I’m in a better mood, since I have a more precise idea now about how to deal with the things that bugged me.

Being uncomfortable led to some thinking, not just about the specific cause of my recent dissatisfaction, but also about the bigger picture. Actually, the more I thought about it, the bigger the picture became. It started with ‘how can we deal with this situation?’ to ‘how do I really want to live my life?’ and back to ‘how can precious help me to achieve that?’.

I read quite a few business books over the last years. Not the standard MBA fare, but books on how to be more innovative, about leading teams, or promoting and selling your product. Most of these books claimed to have a different approach on how to run a business – and some really had. But while the methods sometimes were unorthodox and unusual, they all had the same objective: grow your business and make more profit.

The pursuit of economic growth is so engrained in our society that it’s rarely questioned. It has been facing more and more opponents recently, but most of them are motivated by ecological concerns. Questioning growth because we run out of fossil fuels is certainly legitimate and important. But the main problem I have with our striving for growth is that it is the wrong objective. Growth is a means to and end, but as a society – and especially in the world of business – we rarely ask what the end is.

I have been repeatedly asking myself this question during the last days. I was introduced to the economic theories of Keynes and the thoughts of Aristotle and other philosophers. Have I found the answer? No, not yet. But in my mind a clearer picture of what I want precious to be like is slowly emerging.

One issue we have been focussing this week is finding new talent. We prepared some job postings and an associated gimmick, that we will release next week.

But while we had a lot of discussions in the last months about what kind of people we are looking for, we never really asked why. Growing your business seems so obvious, almost like natural law, that you don’t have to ask why you want to do it – you only have to have an argument for not doing it.

So, why do we want to add new team members? If someone had asked me this strange question, I would have replied: Because we have more interesting project enquiries than we can fulfill.

Makes sense, doesn’t it? Few would challenge this answer, because that’s how businesses are suppose to work: If your services are in higher demand, you scale to accommodate.

But a five-year old and Sakichi Toyoda would probably not leave it at that – and neither should we. “But why do you want to take on more or bigger projects?” – “Because that way we can make more profit.” – “Why do you want to make more profit?” – “Because…”

Here’s the point where the chain of argument breaks. Do we want to add new people to make more money? We constantly make enough to keep the business afloat, save some cash for rainy days and invest a little in good office chairs, faster computers and a sandwich maker. And with the salaries we pay ourselves, we all can maintain a comfortable lifestyle. So do we really need to be more profitable?

There have to be other, better reasons for growing the team. I think they were always there, but I hadn’t been aware of them enough, let alone communicate them. But now that we are actively searching for new employees, we should be crystal-clear about our motives.

Rewind… “Why do you want to add new team members?” – “Because I want to surround myself with more inspiring people. Women and men I can learn from, who challenge my ideas, who are fun to be around with.” That’s a deeply personal need I have. I want to spend my precious time with people I like, respect, admire.

Another answer: “I want to be able to focus on tasks other than client work.” Writing, teaching, developing our own products… these are some of the things that Michael, Christophe and I really would love to explore more. Can we achieve that with a bigger team? Or is it even counterproductive?

And finally, a consequence of the former: “I want to work less.” Saying this is almost a taboo in our society, even more so among entrepreneurs. But while I really like working as a designer, I would love to have more time for leisure activities. So by increasing the staff I hope to reduce the amount of work we have to do in the long run. Obviously there is also the risk of the opposite happening. That’s why we need to be very careful when we hire.

OK, so much for that. Here’s what happened in the last two weeks, outside of my head:

There was a important demo presentation for the investors of Puichon on Monday, so Christophe, David and I worked hard to get some last minute designs ready to implement. We even worked a weekend shift, which we usually try to avoid like the plague. But it was worth it, the product benefits greatly from these additions. The prototype was always a collection of bits and pieces. Some of the apps had a properly designed interface, other didn’t, and the connection between those different applications wasn’t there. Now, because people outside of the team had to understand it, we had to think in a bigger context. It’s still far from being finished, but now it feels much more like a real product.

Christophe and Michael worked on Conuma. I must admit that I don’t know too much about the current status of the project, as we missed our weekly review on Friday.

Michael also build the above mentioned “gimmick” for our quest for fresh blood. I think it turned out really cool. There is much more going on under the hood than you might imagine, but it’s not obvious. In my book, that’s a good thing.

On Monday the whole crew, including our lost brother Sean, went to the Tocotronic concert at the Thalia Theatre to celebrate the release of their latest album. There’s one quote from this new record that makes a perfect ending for this weeknote (sorry if you don’t speak German, but the beauty of these lines would be lost in translation):

Das ist keine Erzählung,
das ist nur ein Protokoll,
doch wir können davon lernen,
wie wir leben wollen.