We’ve taken the liberty of translating the key questions here:
Playing Ping-pong
Louisa Heinrich, Senior Group Strategist, Fjordnet & Norbert Kurz, Service Design Director, Fjord GmbH
Q: What are the challenges when creatives and technology work together?
Louisa: What challenges? We work closely together across disciplines, like a game of ping-pong. The problems we solve are challenging enough – we don’t need to add internal communication issues to the mix!
Q: Many agencies say there’s not enough understanding and respect between creatives and developers...
Nobert: In our group there are actually no borders or issues between the individual disciplines. It is much more about holistic, comprehensive thinking - in dynamic and iterative development cycles, open communication and a constant exchange of ideas are essential.
Louisa: In a theatre, directors, actors, make-up artists and scene designers work closely together, and many of them wear different hats at different times. Similarly, the role a person plays at Fjord isn’t the most important thing – what’s important is the passion and curiosity needed to solve an issue.
Q: How will the job of the designer change in the future?
Norbert: In general, the actual job won't change much, neither for designers nor developers. But in order to be successful, both will need to understand that they might have to wear several hats throughout the process. As Rich Gold put it in his book, "The Plentitude": sometimes it takes the perspective and understanding of an artist, sometimes that of a scientist and other times that of a designer or engineer.
Q: What’s Fjord’s methodology for aligning design and technology?
Louisa: We use a modular process with a variety of tools and methods: research with users and on the service landscape, client workshops, prototype development to make the vision tangible and comprehensible. We decide for each project which methods make the most sense. And if we don’t have the right method for a problem, we develop a new one and document it. It is important that we be responsive to our ever-changing environment, and to always ask ourselves: What's the problem we’re trying to solve?
The PAGE magazine website can be found here (http://www.page-online.de/).
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