The Challenge

dd com, a Zurich-based communications agency, recently realised the client magazine “Clever” for SKODA Switzerland. It covers topics around general lifestyle and mobility and is published four times a year.

To keep up with the current demand for digital content, especially on tablet computers, dd com looked for the technical know-how and best solution to publish the existing magazine and its content on the iPad.

The demand was clear: the thoughtfully designed magazine should not lose its aesthetic quality, should be easy to deliver to the iPad quarterly and the content and layouts of the digital magazine should be edited and styled by dd com themselves to get around complicated workflows with an external partner for the preparation of every new issue.

The Solution

Spoiled Milk proposed to introduce and school dd com on the use of the Adobe Digital Publishing Suite. The suite allows design and preparation of content within the industry standard layout software Adobe InDesign directly for the use on iPad. It also allows the creation of highly interactive navigation between the content and with additional tools from the suite, the designer can create interactive elements within the content especially for use on a touchscreen.

New issues can be published in a breeze directly from InDesign over the Adobe distribution service and downloaded by the end-user over the branded wrapper application.

Spoiled Milk introduced and consulted dd com on the suite to ensure the agency’s success in the design and concept of the digital magazine.

See the magazine in action

When I was choosing a company for my internship, my intention was to gain some knowledge and experience, and to feel like “being an employee”, to come into an office and have a real working day. Being part of the great Spoiled Milk team absolutely was that kind of journey!

During the last 2 months, I have been Creative Intern with Spoiled Milk and I have participated in the daily work and gained insight into the output of qualified designers and developers. I have been working in all stages of the design process, learned to design based on client requirements, and furthermore I have learned to use my knowledge in practice! I had a chance to test my knowledge in real situations and to face real and practical problems, which are daily routine of Spoiled Milk people.

I want to take this opportunity to thank Spoiled Milk for their guidance and supervision the past 2 months. The experience was more than I could have expected. They allowed me the freedom to design and develop projects within the company, as a member of the team. Being intern in Spoiled Milk helped me use the knowledge I’ve acquired over the past two years as a student at Copenhagen School of Design and Technology. They have been able to challenge both my strengths and weaknesses! The team shared their expertise and knowledge within the field. Through the sharing I felt I was able to learn and grow the most in developing my skills. They were most responsive to my requests and always made me feel like a full-time member of the team.

Moreover, I have learned to commit myself in a multicultural environment with the most caring and helpful professionals!

Thanks TEAM for being the BEST team and thank you all guys for making my internship here become the greatest experience.

If I should write up all my reflections and impressions, the post would never end! BUT I can fully recommend an internship at Spoiled Milk! AND if you want to know more about my experiences as intern, please feel free to ask!

http://www.facebook.com/FrederikkeKamper

I feel sad leaving the Spoiled Milk team, but a wise man told me once that a cube has 6 sides.

Making it all meaningful was also a key message throughout. And what better way to add meaning to your life than doing something good along the way. Tim O’Reilly spoke about how the venture model has gotten distorted: “We need to find more businesses that have aims to change the world – not just make money”.

The main output from the Al Gore / Sean Parker session was similarly to transform the grey system into an interactive, life-improving democracy. In this early stage of social media, they pointed out how what we’re sharing and contributing with has a passive tendency and that we’ll need to move towards actions that can benefit society.

Bruce Sterling, the author known for always rounding off SXSW, did his usual no-slides, half-improv, real-witty show with certain strikes of genius. He spoke about the five stacks – Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft – that will all eventually be destroyed (debatable!), following their direct competition to rule the world. They will all want their own OS, smartphone, tablet, etc. and instead of seeing one winner, we’ll see “stack deterioration”.

His real poetry – because he carries this quality – came when he imagined a guy sitting out there in the “augmented, ubiquitous, post-stack future, in 25 years, maybe 30 years” going through the material from SXSW ‘12.

Bruce went: “Good, smaller, smaller, saturation, you suck, South By Southwest, before dematerialisation, video, run it, famous guy, he’s boring, stupid, god, why do they talk like this, like watching ice melt, why don’t they get to the point, like, she’s got a piece of glass on her ear, why would she do that, that guy’s got a cool hat, bring it on, scan it, 3D scan, print the hat, I want the hat, nothing much going on here, seen it all before, these people … you know, they really kind of look excited, not like me, kind of engaged in what they’re doing, so romantic what they’re doing, what a precious time to be there when they didn’t know how it would turn out, oh, it’s too poignant, a spectacle to bear.”

On that note, SXSW ‘12 was rounded off with free books from Sterling and the town of Austin shifted into a full-on music mecca. The Silicon Valley audience was overtaken by Brooklyn laidbacks, and those of us lucky enough to experience both festivals could reflect back on all the injected inspiration at the loud tones of A-class bands.

As on Tuesday night at outdoor clear-skied Belmont, when Built To Spill sang their comforting lines “Some things never change / Nothing’s going to change that / Some things you can’t explain / Like why we’re all embracing conventional wisdom in a world that’s just so unconventional”.

Other posts in this series:

• SXSW Highlights #1: We’re Local – How To Add Value in the Real World
• SXSW Highlights #2: We’re Emotional – How To Enact the Soft Layer
• SXSW Highlights #3: We’re Wrong – How To Fail Intelligently
• SXSW Highlights #4: We’re Human – How To Automate and Remove Boundaries

Awarded by Fast Company as one of the most influential women in technology, Amber Case filled the largest room plus a few rooms set up for simulcasting. As far as she’s concerned, humans have become cyborgs, “smartphones are the new cigarettes”, and now we need to become good at it. Good in her view means making it easy to be surrounded by technology and killing the many obstacles. Eventually, making technology invisible.

What does she exactly mean by cyborgs? Our memories have become hyperlinked into technology, where we need to find a certain email, certain Wikipedia page, certain external document to remember the information we need. The computer is our external brain and cyborgs become the paleontologist searching for information.

Welcome to the world of information jet lag where each communication medium has its own set of acceptable response times. On Twitter, it’s quick. Text messages are also fast, almost instantaneous. Versus an email, which may take longer.

Case also spoke about the importance of innovation – “if you keep technology for too long, it starts to turn against you” and how persistent architectures is really dangerous, because it blocks new innovation. She hates newspaper apps that simulate turning paper (it’s an obstacle that extends the time it takes to flip to a new page!), but loves the easy “superhuman interface” of Flipboard.

She dreams of calm technology, where your actions in themselves become buttons that trigger invisible interfaces when you do things. The best interfaces compress the time and space it takes to absorb relevant information, and the worst cause us car accidents, lost revenue, and communication failures.

Other posts in this series:

• SXSW Highlights #1: We’re Local – How To Add Value in the Real World
• SXSW Highlights #2: We’re Emotional – How To Enact the Soft Layer
• SXSW Highlights #3: We’re Wrong – How To Fail Intelligently
• SXSW Highlights #5: We’re Excited – How To Be Happy Cyborgs

In the talks relating to entrepreneurship, the running theme was the fact that we’re sometimes wrong and need to stay alert for changing course.

Before Biz Stone arrived at his la-di-da conclusion “Change the world, build a business – and have fun doing it” he told the story of how Twitter landed. Twelve people were working in Odeo lead by Evan Williams, who realised that the decent chunk of funding secured for RSS syndicated audio and video would be better off invested in something else. Podcasting was taking shape at the same time and was actually doing fine inside iTunes.

So instead of driving further into the dead end, they kept their vision of radical innovation but shifted strategy. They split into 6 groups of 2 people, each group allowed to do whatever they wanted. Biz landed with young engineer Jack Dorsey (today Twitter Chairman) and the rest is history.

SXSW of 2007 was crucial: 5,000 people were using it at the time, but Biz only realised its impact when he was in a panel and the majority of the audience suddenly left to attend the other panel across the hallway. Apparently, a leading capacity had informed everyone that the other talk was better and the “flock” followed.

In Eric Ries’ session about entrepreneurship he went further into the topic of failure as a necessary part of entrepreneurship. His point: Truly successful startups are able to keep one foot anchored and at the same time change what’s not working. The act of changing what’s not working is the “pivot” – defined as a change in strategy without a change in vision.

A three-pronged approach was proposed by Ried: 1) Establish the baseline, 2) Tune the engine, 3) Pivot or persevere. A sweet point from Ried was how companies ought to move away from concerning themselves with vanity metrics (having 1 million Facebook fans) and focus on the actionable metrics (1 million webshop visitors with only 1% purchasing).

Linkedin’s Reid Hoffman talked about entrepreneurial career-planning and how to start thinking of yourself as in permanent beta – “it’s always day one”. Further, he emphasised the concept of “ABZ planning”: Plan A being the current plan, Plan B being the alternative and Plan Z being what allows you to take risk and ultimately reset to a new Plan A.

The takeaway from the Hoffman session was his talk about taking intelligent risk. According to him, there are two ways to work with risk: First, you can try to anticipate and perfectly predict the future. And good luck doing that! Second, you can try to become resilient to risk by proactively introducing risk into your career. Such “risk introductions” may take the shape of volunteering for extra work, running experiments, changing jobs, freelancing, etc.

Other posts in this series:

• SXSW Highlights #1: We’re Local – How To Add Value in the Real World
• SXSW Highlights #2: We’re Emotional – How To Enact the Soft Layer
• SXSW Highlights #4: We’re Human – How To Automate and Remove Boundaries
• SXSW Highlights #5: We’re Excited – How To Be Happy Cyborgs

Chip Conley spoke about emotional equations – based on his book “Peak” about how companies can get their “mojo” from Maslow learnings. With a background in building highly successful boutique hotels that allow for “identity refreshments”, he addressed the topic of how to “unpack what’s inside of us”.

All companies aspire to connect with their customers – just like people aspire for self-actualisation. He quoted Victor Frankl on man’s search for meaning: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our meaning.” On that note, he listed a bunch of emotional equations, including: Despair = Suffering – Meaning … Happiness = Wanting what you have / Having what you want … Regret = Disappointment + sense of responsibility.

Continuing on despair, Conley quoted Socrates: “He who is not content with what he has will not be happy with what he wants to have” and concluded that disappointment is the natural result of badly managed reality.

So, how can companies move towards creating and maintaining self-actualised customers? His recipe was a four-step rocket:
1) Help customers reach their highest goals
2) Give customers ability to truly express themselves
3) Make customers feel like they’re part of a bigger cause
4) Offer your customers something of real value that they hadn’t imagined
In Conley’s view, transformational companies do at least one or more of these themes.

He also touched upon the topic of choice with an interesting example: A research study had set up two tables with jam. The first table had 26 glasses of jam, the second had only 6 glasses of jam. When people entered the room, 50% more people went to the first table with 26 glasses of jam. However, the second table with only 6 glasses of jam sold 10 times more. It’s a great example of how choice should be served to users. We love choice, but it also provides an extra portion of complexity. Conley found it preferably to start with less choices and grow to more.

He rounded off on promoting authenticity, again with a quote, this time from Oscar Wilde: “Be yourself, everyone else is taken”.

Other posts in this series:

• SXSW Highlights #1: We’re Local – How To Add Value in the Real World
• SXSW Highlights #3: We’re Wrong – How To Fail Intelligently
• SXSW Highlights #4: We’re Human – How To Automate and Remove Boundaries
• SXSW Highlights #5: We’re Excited – How To Be Happy Cyborgs

I had the pleasure of attending SXSW Interactive 2012 earlier this month and what a spectacular digital showdown it was.

Within the 5-day tech-mecca, weather went from Texan winter to steamy spring, while speakers inside the Austin Convention Center encouraged entrepreneurs to lift the “Nerd Spring”, Sean Parker’s characterisation of status quo, out of its early passive social stage and into a valuable size that leads people to take action and change the world in a societally benefiting direction.

This in the first of five blog posts, in which I’ll highlight dominant themes throughout the presentations and panel discussions.

On the first day, Mashable handed out printed newspapers, in which they concluded on the main apps to watch during the conference. Of those were notably those pertaining to social ambience: Highlight, Ban.jo, Sonar. Their common thread: How they help you discover relevant people on your real-world path and allow you to connect on the spot or in retrospect. Dilemmas include privacy issues of allowing strangers to discover who you are as well as battery issues of allowing the location-check to constantly happen in the background.

SoLoMo – recent term coining Social, Local, Mobile – was a consistent buzzword during the conference and was discussed in a panel by Kveton, Galligan, Messina and Rohrs. They addressed the challenge of bringing personalisation to your device and making sense of the data coming from the cloud.

They also pointed to another challenge relating to social ambience apps – that of awkwardness. Virtual connections forced into the physical space can be weird if all that links you is the fact you’re standing in the same coffee joint, knowing the same person – “Oh, so you also know John” – “Not really, an acquaintance of my ex-girlfriend” – “Oh, well …”. There’s a need to focus on what’s physically relevant, like what kind of coffee you picked, and yeah, you could do this without an app.

The SoLoMo session also touched on “the class of data-privileged people”: Our relatively simple actions – such as performing a check-in at a given location – can earn us discounts and deals. Which brings us to the interview with Dennis Crowley from Foursquare. His company now employs 100 people, of which 60 attended SXSW.

His service has 20 million users and is putting a lot more focus into leveraging the user’s track record to serve relevant recommendations and deals. If Foursquare has learned you’re really into pizza restaurants, it can welcome you with pizza recommendations upon your arrival in a new city.

He’s confident this type of service will become mainstream over the next couple of years – driven by the recommendations that help you understand and use your surroundings better.

Other posts in this series:

• SXSW Highlights #2: We’re Emotional – How To Enact the Soft Layer
• SXSW Highlights #3: We’re Wrong – How To Fail Intelligently
• SXSW Highlights #4: We’re Human – How To Automate and Remove Boundaries
• SXSW Highlights #5: We’re Excited – How To Be Happy Cyborgs

What you’ll be doing

Working as part of our creative design team in all stages of the digital design process including: project research and analysis, idea conception, visualization and development through illustrative and/or digital sketches, iterative implementation stages and working with our team of front-end and back-end developers in completing the visual experience of the given project.

Whether you’re designing for iOS devices, websites or sketching platform-independent concepts, your understanding of the digital space is crucial.

Our clients come from media, publishing, entertainment, finance, pharmaceutical and many other industries, so your ability to easily zoom in on the visual, conceptual challenge in the context of the organization and the project is needed.

With the design department based in Copenhagen and key clients spread across eight countries, you can expect a lot of virtual communication and a bit of traveling.

Requirements

We expect that you meet the following criteria:

• Enthusiastic and independent
• Confident in both Danish and English
• Agency experience or other related teamwork
• A passion for pixel perfection
• Some technical web knowledge is a plus
• Deep interest for web and mobile technologies creating value for a modern world

What we offer

• An agency with ambitions and continued success
• Great colleagues from various backgrounds and a friendly working environment
• Individual responsibility with the opportunity to grow on a personal and professional level

Where

You will be working in our Copenhagen office.

Your application

Please send your application and portfolio to Creative Director Casper Hübertz (casper@spoiledmilk.dk). If you have any questions about this position then please contact Casper on +45 28 10 54 18.

Every other Wednesday, we at Spoiled Milk have a group meeting that ends with one of us doing a presentation on the subject we work with, or are just curious about in general.

We’ve had presentations on iOS development, the internal processes we run our projects by, and just about everything else related to running a company like ours.

Being the new kid on the block, it was my turn last week, and I figured my presentation should be a combination of introducing myself, what I’m interested in as well as what I’ll be working with at Spoiled Milk.

So, my name is Mark, I’m a User Experience Designer, and I started working in the Copenhagen office at the beginning of 2012, mainly on projects related to 24MAS, Spoiled Milk’s parent company.

I recently graduated from Copenhagen Business School, but before that I was fortunate enough to land myself an internship at Google in Zurich last fall.

At Google, I worked with my fellow Dane and UX Designer, Morten Just, who one day at lunch asks me if he has ever told me about his theory of all design being compensation for not being able to do telepathy and teleportation.

Flabbergasted, I answered no, I hadn’t heard that. But as we came to talk more about it, I found that he’s absolutely right.

Part of this blog post is written in an airport, one of the most designed (if you can call something more or less designed) spaces on Earth. Me being here is a compensation for not being able to just think I’d like to be somewhere else.

It’s a better compensation in this situation than going by train, car or bicycle, so with personal transportation, I think we’ve moved somewhat closer to actually performing teleportation.

The same goes for the mobile phone. I can talk to someone in New Zealand, just as easily as I can talk to someone down the road. All the while I still sit at my desk.

But that’s also telepathy. Language is great for moving thoughts between our minds, and by telling you how I feel, you can get a peek into my head, so to speak.

These are examples of technology that make our lives much easier, by being designed to help us and aid us in solving our problem at hand.

At the same time, I sit in a different airport right now than the one I was in yesterday, because the plane I was about to fly home with, had a mechanical failure.

It was pretty far from a seamless experience, and that is where I see designers’ biggest challenge (and opportunity) lie.

More or less everything we touch during the day is what I would define as technology. We put on clothes to bring the warmth of our home with us as well as use bicycles to amplify our muscles’ power output. That is technology.

The artifacts we use to do this with are all designed by someone. The *designer* might have spent only a little time on it (and then we all know what happens next), or a lot (which isn’t necessarily great either).

The moment you pick up a stick from the ground in the forest to aid your walking, it’s taking the wood out of its natural element, and into an artificial one. The moment you did so, you designed the wood for a new situation.

It wasn’t hard or difficult, and you probably didn’t think much about it because it fits the situation so well.

But there are still seams in the experience.

The wood might be wet and slippy, it might have thorns or it might be fragile and break when you try walking up the hill, supporting your weight on it.

This happens every day with almost every kind of technology you can think of, and it’s a great opportunity for design to come through and help the user get up again and move on with their business.

However, if we take a look at the broad view again, I’d love it if we could all try to imagine how the stuff we put into the world will help us move closer to telepathy and teleportation.

Twitter and Instagram are my two favorite services that help me do so at the moment.

With Twitter, I can follow people I admire and think are clever and funny, and they are gracious enough to let me look into their minds, making me smarter as a result.

Instagram let’s me see what others see, and I can jump from Copenhagen or New York to Santiago and Tokyo with just a flick of my thumb.

I wish all design would bring me closer to achieving these goals and make the seams I encounter along the way much more beautiful.

Then I think we’d all live in a place that’s a little more fun and enjoyable.

If you are so inclined, you can read more about designing for telepathy and teleportation in my blog post on the subject of my Master’s Thesis: “The Post-Functional Paradigm: Why all designs are compensations for telepathy and teleportation.“

Photo by Gregory Crewdson.