FabLabs are small personal manufacturing workshops where everyday people can create almost everything. FabLabs demystify technology by making high-tech equipment and knowledge available to everyone. The FabLab movement has spread all over the world (Google Map).

In this session we will explore who uses a FabLab and why. You will also learn how people interact with laser cutters and 3D printers, what hurdles exist, why these hurdles exist and how they can be overcome so that you can create concepts how to make personal fabrication available to the everyone. The session will focus on 3D printing so that you can understand the hype and reality around 3D printing.

About the Speaker

Martin Geck, member of the FabLab Munich, says “Don’t believe the press: 3D printing is not a revolution. The revolution is how we make 3D printing available to everyday people.” Martin studied art history, sociology and computer science and worked as UX designer and product manager at international software companies. He is a certified scrum product owner and loves user stories.

When & Where

When: Monday, June 10th at 7pm. Import IxDA Munich Calendar
Where: Mediadesign Hochschule für Design und Informatik München, Inforaum 4. OG, Claudius-Keller-Straße 7, 81669 München | Map

> Register here <

Sponsor Mediadesign Hochschule, thank you for supporting the local design community and hosting this event.

About the Speaker

Aarron Walter is the Director of User Experience at MailChimp, where he strives to make software more human. Aarron is the author of Designing for Emotion from A Book Apart. Aarron taught design at colleges in the US and Europe for nearly a decade, and speaks at conferences around the world. His design guidance has helped the White House, the US Department of State, and dozens of startups and venture capitalists. He tweets about design under the moniker @aarron on Twitter.

About Aarron’s Latest Book

“Make your users fall in love with your site via the precepts packed into this brief, charming book by MailChimp user experience design lead Aarron Walter. From classic psychology to case studies, highbrow concepts to common sense, Designing for Emotion demonstrates accessible strategies and memorable methods to help you make a human connection through design.” Foreword by Jared Spool

When & Where

When: Monday, May 6th at 7pm. Import IxDA Munich Calendar
Where: Designaffairs München, Balanstraße 73 | Haus 32, 81541 München Map

> Register here <

Sponsor

Designaffairs, thank you for supporting the local design community, hosting this event and offering drinks and snacks.

For the project – a team of 12 creatives and a client with nearly 100 stakeholders, working on a complete relaunch of the website containing different content types, in-site advertising, including order process, media center and self-care area – “we had to adapt the current best practices and define new workflows.”

After conducting research no responsive websites were found that compare to this latest project. So far only smaller and less complex websites have implemented a responsive web design. For these projects it is easier and more likely to follow an “ideal” workflow in order to create the design.

Therefore we like to look at the current best practices and methodologies preached by “responsive design evangelists” and see whether they are feasible for such a complex project. What works and what doesn’t? Can you follow a “mobile first” approach in such a project? How do you create a design specification for over 100 modules without creating a “paper monster”? How do you present responsive designs to a client who wants to see pixel perfection and important elements “above the fold”? What deliverables should be created for the client? How to communicate the topic of responsive design to a client yet unfamiliar with the concept?

About the speaker

Sabine Berghaus is a passionate UX designer and loves to explore how technology changes the way people interact and collaborate. Having started her career as a user researcher she quickly became interested in turning the results from user research into concepts and designs for digital applications. For more than 6 years now she has worked for different clients mainly from the telecommunications, entertainment, utility and healthcare industry. Her focus is on complex process-oriented and mobile solutions.

She holds a master’s degree in international information management from the university of Hildesheim and currently works a Senior Information Architect at SapientNitro in Munich.

When: Monday, April 8th at 7pm. Import IxDA Munich Calendar
Where: Sapient, Arnulfstraße 60, 80335 München

> Join here (free event) <

Sponsor

Once again we would like to thank Sapient for supporting the local IxD community! Drinks and snacks will be provided.

For our upcoming Munich UX Book Club on March 11th we are going to discuss Nathan Shedroff & Christopher Noessel‘s 2012 book “Make It So“.

About the book: 

Many designers enjoy the interfaces seen in science fiction films and television shows. Freed from the rigorous constraints of designing for real users, sci-fi production designers develop blue-sky interfaces that are inspiring, humorous, and even instructive. By carefully studying these “outsider” user interfaces, designers can derive lessons that make their real-world designs more cutting edge and successful.

Make It So shows:

• Sci-fi interfaces have been there (almost) from the beginning
• Sci-fi creates a shared design language that sets audience expectations
• If an interface works for an audience, there’s something there that will work for users
• Bad sci-fi interfaces can sometimes be the most inspiring
• There are ten “meta-lessons” spread across hundreds of examples
• You can use—and not just enjoy—sci-fi in your design work
• Over 150 lessons and 10 “meta“ lessons that developers can use to enhance their realworld interfaces

How to prepare for the meeting?

• Have a look at: http://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/science-fiction-interface/
• Read Nathan Shedroff & Christopher Noessel’s blog at http://scifiinterfaces.wordpress.com/
• Watch Nathan Shedroff & Christopher Noessel’s talk at Stanford University http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxRoe5vk3dg
• Read the book: Amazon Kindle or Paperback from Amazon UK

When: Monday, March 11th at 7pm. Import IxDA Munich Calendar
Where: IDEO, Kellerstraße 27 81667 München
Want to join? RSVP here on Xing.

The Munich UX Book Club is a readers’ forum which is open to everyone who wants to engage in in-depth discussions on books that have relevance to the UX community. There is neither a membership, a membership fee nor any other cost for the participants involved. Being familiar with the relevant book topic (at least to some extend) is the only requierement.

Sponsor

Facts

Survey Period: ca. 2 months, end of 2012.

Participants: 24

Location: mostly from Munich

Professionals: mostly interaction designers and usability experts.

The IxDA Munich Survey 2011 is published under Creative Commons 3.0: some rights reserved, you may reproduce, reblog and modify the content of this survey, but you must provide proper attribution. Link to http://www.ixdamunich.de

Download the survey here: IxDA_Munich_Survey_2012