Weekly Recap #22: Design. Bier. Zack. Fertig.
Welcome to Oberschöneweide. It’s super nice out here.
I’m Harry, we are diesdas.digital and this is the weekly recap’s off-site edition: I spent a week away from the others, teaching at HTW, a university of applied sciences located in the outskirts of Berlin — namely Oberschöneweide. What, why, how? We’re about to find out!
For the past year I’ve had the opportunity to teach communication design at HTW, just like Lorenz, which is always great fun and a welcome change of perspective from the daily desk work. Obligatory thanks go out to Andreas Ingerl for making this possible.
The HTW has two campuses, but Oberschöneweide has the more beautiful one, with heaps of industrial flair from a bygone era, manifested in these impressively large buildings, now occupied by students. It’s a bit of a trip out there, but it’s well worth a visit and a distinctly different part of Berlin if you usually find yourself in the inner parts of the city.
This semester I once again teamed up with Sascha Sigl to conduct a short, but intense project lasting only five days. We chose “data visualization” as the topic, thinking this might be a good opportunity for students to combine their development and design skills. Only 10 students picked our course, formed four groups and the show got on the road, as you can see above.
We quickly discovered that the differences in skill levels were pretty extreme … one group decided to gather data from the iPhone’s accelerometer and gyroscope sensors, use socket.io to send them to a Macbook running a node server and turn the movements into sound through the Web Audio API; building a step sequencer, involving an arpeggiator and cobbling everything together with Angular.js.
… yeah, right? You gotta be fucking kidding me. 😅
One could argue that this is not strictly speaking data visualization, but really, who cares? The result was way beyond what we expected was possible within one week.
Another group built a website showing statistics about the European football/soccer championships, gathering lots of data points about the teams and then visualizing those numbers relative to each other. They even bought a domain and put it online: check out emstats.de. There were two more groups building infographics about the environmental impact of coffee consumption and the food waste occurring in supermarkets, but unfortunately their work didn’t make it to a public domain (yet).
We forced everyone to use Git+Github, organize their work through Slack and build a website from scratch, hoping the students would all start to see HTML+CSS+JS as empowering design tools and be less intimidated by the word “code” afterwards. Looking at the results I’d say: mission accomplished.
[Note: Lorenz and I will both return to HTW next semester, but Sascha is unfortunately out to pursue new adventures. All the best from us!]
Personally I find working with the students at HTW refreshing and inspiring because the use of technology and design is so different from the real world. Less driven by business goals, more experimental, more daring. Once you’re sitting in an office, with a salary and a job title, start discussing budgets and hierarchies, logging your hours, worrying about deadlines… then that playful ethos is lost. Not entirely, not necessarily, but to a noticeable degree.
Therefore coming out to Oberschöneweide is somehow cleansing for me, reminding me why we all chose to do this job in the first place.
And that’s it already … well almost. In case you liked this post, we have a few social media channels you could subscribe to: e.g. this very Medium publication would be a good start. Snapchat, Instagram and Twitter are cool as well. You could also click a like button on Facebook, but who does that? Exactly, don’t bother. 🤓
Anyhow, see you next week when I rejoin the others in the office — but more importantly: enjoy your weekend first! 💚
… not quite at the end yet, keep scrolling …
Still here?
Cool. Lorenz and Lars asked me to include a topic close to their hearts: the Volksentscheid Fahrrad, which is an initiative to make Berlin more bicycle-friendly. They are in petition-stage right now and need your signature to keep going, eventually reaching a binding, Berlin-wide vote that the senate is currently trying to prevent from happening. So if you’re in Berlin and agree that we need better, safer bikeways and a focus on healthy, sustainable transport which doesn’t pollute the environment, hop on your bike and sign the petition. This is direct democracy at work and you can be part of it! 🚲
