The subject of my master’s project are visual tools for the exploration, evaluation and communication of financial information. I will explore how interactive and dynamic mapping of complex structures and processes can support understanding and thereby lead to a more critical examination of your financials. My goal is provide you with a set of tools to better understand where your money is coming from, where it is stored and where it is going. As a bonus, I’d like to help you understand what impact your money has on society, economy and our environment.

I will be mentored by Prof. Dr. Gerhard M. Buurman. He established the Interaction Design course at the ZHdK in 2000 and co-founded the Swiss Design Institute for Finance and Banking (SDFB) in 2007 and is currently the director of the Institute for Design Research. The proximity to the SDFB provides a repository of experience and expertise, which allows me to build on a well-established foundation and existing results.

During my studies I will continue to work at Interactive Things where I handle communication and coordination. My master’s project can be considered an internal research project for us, where we have the opportunity to focus on a user-centric approach to design and implementation without the limitations in time and budget. This will allow us to bring together theory and practice in one comprehensive piece of work.

If you’re interested in learning more about my project and follow my research findings and work results, I will publish updates on master.benjaminwiederkehr.com.

South By, as the cool kids call it, is one of the biggest festivals and features five packed days of presentations from the brightest minds in emerging technology, networking events and special programs showcasing the best new digital works, video games and innovative ideas the international community has to offer.

Invited by the good folks at JESS3, I will join Adam Bly of Visualizing.org, Eric Friedman of Foursquare and our moderator Robin Richards on the panel entitled Social Media Data Visualization: Mapping the World’s Conversations. Together, we will explore the significance of visualization in relation to the expanding reach and uses of social media as not just tellers of social media stories, but part of larger communications strategies. The panel takes place on Saturday March 12, 3:30pm at the Austin Convention Center in Austin, TX.

As individuals and companies across the world rely more and more heavily on social media, data visualization has become sine qua non in not only displaying analytics and metrics, but also in understanding macro and micro trends by platform, network and individual. This panel will explore information design, data visualization, relationship mapping and statistics — and how they all fit together to create compelling infographics, data visualizations and dynamic dashboards in hot pursuit of the holy grail of information design: make it more digestible and more human.

The four of us will share insights, discuss measurements of success & qualities and propose strategies on how to implement these in the day to day work. My focus lies on how we as practitioners can ensure integrity, underline relevance and maintain clarity in form & function while striving for impact and immersion. Ideally, we will have different views on these points and therefore a vivid discussion can emerge. At this point I want to wish Robin, the moderator of this panel, the best of luck and to thank him for making this possible.

A short word about my fellow panelists:

Adam Bly is the founder and CEO of Seed Media Group, an integrated media and technology company committed to helping advance science and its potential to improve the state of the world. He has lectured at the World Economic Forum, The Museum of Modern Art, Harvard, MIT, The Royal Society on the future of science and its role in society.

Eric Friedman is Director of Client Services at Foursquare.  Eric was formerly the analyst at Union Square Ventures, a VC firm focussed on early stage technology companies.  Eric has combined his entrepreneurial interests and experience in product management, finance, IT, marketing, and account management in his work.

Robin Richards is Art Director of JESS3, where he is responsible for overseeing their infographic output, while also working on data visualizations across web and mobile platforms. His work has been featured on Techcrunch, Flowing Data, Fast Company, Gizmodo, BBC, Guardian, Alltop, and Information Is Beautiful.

Needless to say that I look forward to this event — and the date is approaching very fast. If you happen to be at South By please let me know, I would love to meet up with you and have a chat.

This is the question that will be answered by more than 100 students of the Design Department of the Zurich University of the Arts. In an interdisciplinary project, students from fields like Visual Communication, Industrial Design, Scientific Visualization or Interaction Design will collaborate to explore concepts and approaches on how to utilize the new possibilities provided by tablet computers like the iPad or Galaxy Tab. The course will take place in the spring semester 2011 from March to April and will kick off with the DDE Symposium on March 21st.

I was asked to step in as a lecturer and I’m very excited to join the head of the Interaction Design program and my former professor Dr. Gerhard M. Buurman on this assignment. Together with our students we will focus on potential dialogic collaboration between the reader and the editor. We call this Crowd Editing.

We will guide and advise the students to answer questions like: How do we build an open and accessible editorial office? Which new workflows will be established? What kind of tools and channels will be needed to form vibrant and inspiring interactions between the participants?

I am more than happy to be back at this great institution and to be able to work with such bright minds. It will be an intense undertaking and I look forward to learn as much from my students as I will be of service to them.

You can learn more about it here: http://ixt.gs/aqZx1o

Refine

The new design is based on the same grid as before. A new color palette and some small adjustments served the goal of creating a simple, elegant and friendly interface. To replace the characteristic Clarendon headlines I’ve used the excellent Netto by Daniel Utz — a simple and simply beautiful font. It’s also our corporate font at Interactive Things, thus creating a bridge between the two domains.

Unify

I applied the fundation of the new design to my Tumblr and Twitter account. The consistent look ties the three domains neatly together. Each one has specific requirements though, that I addressed in the design for the application at hand.

Rename

The domain Artillery.ch served as my brand for freelance work in times before Interactive Things. With the establishment of our company, the freelance times are gone and the name became superfluous. As I still need a space to share the things that keep me busy at daytime and up at night, I took the chance to get my personal domain BenjaminWiederkehr.com.

Allocate

Given the fact that my stuff on this site could be irrelevant to someone in search of me, I came to the conclusion that I need a central hub that helps direct the visitor to the right place to interact with me. This could be the corporate site of Interactive Things, my professional CV at LinkedIn or maybe my profile on Facebook. That’s why I built the tiny one-pager at benjaminwiederkehr.com and moved the site that you’re currently reading to blog.benjaminwiederkehr.com.

I goes without saying that changing the top-level domain (and my main e-mail address) takes some time and a lot of “Change Account Settings” link clicking. It’s a work-in-progress and if you see something quirky, please let me know.

For this purpose I have created a PSD template with all the needed elements already in place. You simply change the colors where possible and add your custom background image. Additionally there’s a save  area marked for including textual information in your background image.

As usual the download is free and questions or suggestions are welcome in the comments.

This was my last month at coUNDco.

For the past year (and some more before that) I’ve worked with these fine people on all sorts of exciting projects. I’ve learned a ton about myself, the way agencies work, dealing with clients, and developing web experiences in the real world — a world that has timelines and budgets and limited resources and other potential pitfalls. coUNDco offered me the most enjoyable job imaginable right after my studies, and I think joining them was exactly the right move for me one year ago. But now, it’s time to move on.

There were a lot of factors influencing my decision. I enjoyed my role as an Interface Designer at coUNDco, but also wanted to get involved in the strategy and concept process much earlier than I typically did. Having direct contact with a client can be challenging sometimes, but I enjoy bouncing ideas back and forth and developing holistic concepts. Combine this with my untamable ambitions for creating the highest quality of work, mix in two exceptionally smart friends of mine and add a shared business idea and the outcome is Interactive Things — my dream, my motive power and now my workplace starting January 2010. Christian, Jeremy and I conceptualize, design and develop interactive media solutions. With a field of work ranging from Web to Mobile or Installation and everything in between we solve the need for simplicity, usability and rich user-experience. As you’ve probably noticed by now I’m really really excited about it.

coUNDco has gone through some changes over the past few months and will continue to clarify its strategy for the months to come. For the record, my decision was not based on these changes. I believe coUNDco goes absolutely in the right direction as a online advertising full-service agency. Hans-Jürg, Florian and Remo navigate their boat with agility and cleverness and I congratulate them for their calm mindset in rough times. These are the factors that not only make you survive but actually let you grow and flourish! Needless to say that my “Good Bye” was not an easy one. Let me make some quick notes about the characters that make coUNDco so unique:

Thanks to Andrea for her adaptability over such a shot period of time, Léonie for her supportive nature, Jari for his fresh thinking, Philipp for his calmness and inspirational ideas, Stef for being one of THE hardest engineers, Jean-Pierre for his backup, Garry for being a project management samurai, Miri for bringing the office back to life when needed, Mike for kick-starting good mood. Thank you Remo for all the inspiration, fun and appreciation. Thank you Hans-Jürg for the never-ending support and for driving my interest in entrepreneurship that ultimately led me to owning my own business. Thank you Flo for the excellent work relationship early on and your belief in my ideas.

This big change almost concludes the year 2009 for me, but there is still a lot to do for a seamless transition from being an employee to being both — designer and entrepreneur. I promise to take the lessons learned during my exciting year at coUNDco and do my best to push Interactive Things to where we want it to arrive.

So, if you have a project you’d like to work with me on, please don’t hesitate to get in touch, and if it’s a fit, we’ll figure out how to make it happen.

Sometimes you just need a quick and easy way to customize the default WordPress theme called Kubrick. The theme is based on four main images: kubrickheader.jpg, kubrickfooter.jpg, kubrickbgwide.jpg and kubrickbgcolor.jpg. If you want to only change the look and feel without touching the CSS you can simply replace these images. To easily adjust colors and styles like the drop-shadow I’ve created a PSD template with all the needed sizes, styles and guidlines set-up.

The template is based on the solid work from EduChalk.org with some adjustments for even faster customization.

Brief

Mozilla recently made an open call to designers to get involved in their project “Lizard Reader”. Lizard Reader was created by Les Orchard and is an aggregator for various new feeds from the Mozilla community. Tweets, blog posts, bug reports, wiki changes, code submits, etc get collected. The opportunity for designers is to submit concepts, sketches or prototypes of a intuitive, easy readable and fun frontend for the engine.

My concept

I couldn’t let the chance pass us by and not submitting something. So here goes my concept:

I’ve chosen the sea as a metaphore. News items get dropped into it and then float to the ground where they get arranged and archived just like sediments in the sea. The names of the authors or creators float in the air and arrange themselves just like a swarm of birds.News items basically consist of an author, date, title, body text and a link to the original ressource. Items can be viewed in a more detailed version by clicking on it.

By hovering over a name one can see the items by this author.

When a post is viewed in more detail it pulls related posts in a hierarchic view. Related posts could be by the same author, covering the same topic, edits on the same wiki page or reporting of the same bug.

To get an overview over past days the user can “dig” deeper in the ground and reveal past layers of sediments. By the density and chromaticity of the layer one can judge what happened during the day without having to view every post by itself. This creates a fingerprint and patterns for different activities in the community could emerge.