Designing from the Heart of Berlin
A new SAP Labs Berlin office location was opened at Münzstraße in the heart of Berlin earlier this week. With the opening of the new location, Berlin is now part of the worldwide SAP Labs network with 16 offices in 13 countries. The new office is a space dedicated to design work, co-innovation, and collaboration, where SAP developers build apps for the digital economy and where different SAP design teams, including the SAP Design & Co-Innovation Center are able to open up creativity while being on eye-level with the Berlin TV tower.
When SAP hired a dozen designers in Berlin, the German hotspot of creativity, three years ago, the foundation for a stronger commitment to design and beautiful user interfaces was laid. Since then the “SAP design story” has evolved in an extremely positive way and design has become established as a core focus area for SAP.
The new creative space on the 5thfloor of the Münzstraße office, shared by different design teams, underlines SAP’s commitment to design and the mission to improve the perception of user experience at our customers. The new space may be an old hat from the perspective of a design agency (even though the new space looks familiar to any design agency or co-working space in Berlin), but nothing can take away the energy of the SAP employees working here.
The design floor project started in October 2015. The furnishing and setup was designed by the Design & Co-Innovation Center (DCC) Berlin team, who worked closely with SAP Facility Management to make the space as flexible, creative, and effective as possible to trigger ideas and innovation. Similar to the construction of the customer facing SAP AppHaus in Heidelberg, the top floor in Berlin has been consciously equipped with the core elements only, namely movable DT-Line Tables, bean bag chairs, lounge chairs, kitchen for weekly get-togethers, whiteboards, think tanks and much more. This allows our team to stay flexible with the room setup, but more importantly they can customize the space over time, by building furniture, project war rooms, and more. The new design floor was designed by ourselves and not created around the design by others, which was very important to us.
Curious to know who is working here? The SAP Design & Co-Innovation Center (DCC) is an international and interdisciplinary team of designers, project managers, and other roles committed to humanize the software experience and bring both monetary as well as human value to customers. We offer end-to-end design services and guide our customer towards a more user-centric design culture. In addition to the DCC, the user experience designers from the SAP Product & Innovations for Industries Cloud team improve interfaces for SAP’s Industry solutions of the digital core on Premise and in the cloud. Among other design methods they are using sensors, micro controllers and tangible prototypes to help customers understand the benefits of SAP software intuitively.
“We are thrilled to finally work in our new space! The whole work space set-up encourages creative thinking and will trigger new ideas in the co-innovation projects we do with our customers.”, says Astrid Wunsch, Team Lead User Experience Design, DCC Berlin, SAP Design & Co-Innovation Center. “Planning and setting up the creative space at the top of the SAP Labs Berlin location was a fantastic final project before taking on my new role at the SAP Innovation Center Potsdam. For me personally, the best thing about the new design floor is SAP’s commitment to user experience design and seeing the positive effect on the energy level of the people working there”, adds Marion Fröhlich, Team Lead User Experience Design, SAP Innovation Center Potsdam.
Originally published at experience.sap.com on April 28, 2016.
