What I’ve Been Up To
blokdots is a tool that enables anyone to create hardware prototypes for connected products without any expertise in programming or electronics, allowing users to test ideas earlier and build better products.
I am part of a team of three building the product as a side-project since 2018. Our primary focus is on providing a “low floor” “Low floor — high ceiling” is a paradigm from Seymour Papert’s Logo programming language. for people for whom the task of learning programming or getting into electronics is too daunting or takes too much time. We want to encourage users to mess around, try things and “sketch” with hardware in a playful way. blokdots is friendly, easy to use, and contains many explanations and guardrails. We also try to push the ceiling higher and higher by providing integrations with other design tools.
In Short §
- Developed and published a desktop application with best-in-class UX, gaining a small global user base We even got positive feedback on Hacker News. Would you believe that‽
- Taught workshops with diverse groups of participants
Find out more §
- blokdots.com — The product is free to use — you can download the app on our website!
Field is a strategy tool for product managers that helps them establish a new product development culture focused on clarity, participation, and collaboration.
I was the company’s first hire and spent two and a half years as its Design Lead. In this role, I was responsible for designing and developing features from start to finish.
Our primary challenges were limited resources and a complex conceptual model. We tackled them by working closely with our existing customers to determine their needs, building on solid foundations, establishing a streamlined feature development process The most radical decision was to put “design” last and only invest time to polish features that we knew to work for our users. Expressed in a timeline: 1. Strategy/Plan — 2. Build MVP —— 3. Test (with actual users) ————— 4. Design — 5. Rebuild ———— 6. Start Over, and practicing semantic diligence.
In Short §
- Led Product Design of a complex application for professional users
- Headed development of all new features through the entire product development process — working on strategy, concepts, user research, interaction design, visual design, prototyping, and implementation
- Collaborated closely with the Product Strategy Lead and Engineering Lead to leverage cross-disciplinary potentials
- Designed and implemented a flexible Design System You can browse it on design.field.so. to enable high product quality with limited resources
- Conducted user research interviews and provided customer support
- Headed implementation of the frontend (in React) I enjoy working with code, both to prototype ideas and to directly impact what the users see. [Mostly in React, but I’ve built prototypes in Swift and SwiftUI and fixed bugs in Go.]
Find out more §
- field.so/features — Field is a complex application. This page gives a very broad overview of its features. I also designed and built the website.
- Product Video — This walkthrough video is much more detailed and shows how Product Leaders can use Field in their organization, step-by-step.
- Design System— The Design System and component library I created for the product. The documentation tool is called DSK — it’s an open-source project that I co-founded.
Atelier Disko is a design studio focussing on digital design. Its clients include many companies from the arts and culture sector, as well as large institutions and enterprise companies.
Working at a design studio taught me about working for and with teams of all sizes, delivering value in tight timeframes and making the business case for design.
In Short §
- Created digital-first branding and websites
- Designed and prototyped digital products for both consumers and professional users
- Led the creation of the UI section of a comprehensive Design System for a large corporate client and maintained it for several years
- Co-founded an open-source tool for documenting Design Systems called “DSK”. Learn more about the Design Principles guiding this tool.
Education §
Artifacts improves the way how people create, evaluate and evolve ideas and theories. The initial question was: What if a digital system was designed from the ground up to support the process of nurturing ideas? The result is a reimagining of what an operating system centered around human thought would look like.
Computers can be tools for thinking: They can help us shape our thoughts and express our ideas, making us more creative and letting us solve more complex problems.
The project’s goal was to design a system that enables anyone to make the most of the power of digital tools — not just domain specialists. The resulting general-purpose personal knowledge system, developed from first principles, combines compound documents, networked note-taking, and just-in-time information retrieval.
Find out more §
- artifacts.fyi — The project’s website includes a walkthrough of three scenarios and detailed videos of all features.
- Design Values — We derived five statements that express Artifacts’ sentiment towards the relationship of specific opposing values.
- Design Goals — We defined design goals that describe how the different aspects of the framework should be designed to support creativity as much as possible. Every feature of the system pays into one of the goals.
HfG Schwäbisch Gmünd teaches design in the tradition of the renowned HfG Ulm, founded by Otl Aicher in 1953: a holistic and socially conscious way of design that values systems-thinking and encourages a multidisciplinary, research-driven approach.
Find out more §
- Some of my student projects are available in my project archive. I also interned at Smart Design [London, 2015] and precious design studio [Hamburg, 2016].
To learn more about me, take a look at my about page, check out my writing, or
peek into my bookshelf.
— Glad to meet you. // Christoph