Oh what a year – Thank you 2014!

This was a year with many faces and to summarize these 12 months in one sentence would be something like this: a Year of Empathy, Collaboration, Music Thinking and Brand Development from a Service Design point of view.

For the fashion brand Olsen in Hamburg (Germany) I developed and designed the reality persona’s, based on research in Canada and Germany. We also worked with my brand strategy framework The Company Real Score to map the most essential brand assets as input for the brand deck.

The Übersee-Museum in Bremen (Germany) asked me to do a persona workshop with information on a one year visitors research to make strategic decisions.

Together with Design Thinkers Academy I developed a one day course of Service Design Thinking Fundamentals, a crash course with the basic instruments like stakeholder mapping, value network mapping, persona and customer journey. The next course will be in march 2015.

A sonic branding project: Massive Music in Amsterdam (Netherlands) asked me to help the team with my expertise in musicology and brand strategy. A nice combination of skills.

But there were more music and brand related activities: this year I started in Nijmegen (Netherlands) with a 20×20 (pecha kucha) presentation about Music Thinking and the platform MusicThinking.com, followed by a presentation in Cologne (Germany) about the same subject.
Together with Lutz Hempel from ICG, I did a short Music Thinking exercise during the ICG Change Management Seminar in Düsseldorf (Germany) and a full Music Thinking / Jazz it! workshop presentation in Copenhagen (Denmark) during the Art of Management in Organization conference.

For Bovemij I did the keynote presentation on their connect event in Utrecht. I showed the development of the last 30 years in the music business and how this connects with the challenges of the world we are living in today. The event was organized by my network partner Gerard Scheenstra of Innovatie Vitamine.

With my friend and network partner from the Witten School of Management Stefan Günther I did a workshop based on agile project management for Heraeus in Hanau (Germany); we also advised the board in taking steps towards a scrum framework. For Simon Weber and Friends, Berlin (Germany) I facilitated the alumni meeting with 150 people in Berlin with 10 iPads for the workshop presentations and created the Systemiker-Map  to visualize the region they work and their expertise.

The Efteling – the Dutch love brand number one – asked me to help them translate their massive research activities in a decision making instrument for a better way of collaboration between marketing and design. We worked with reality personas based on a big amount of research data and also worked with the design team on aspirational personas to strengthen the brand perspective in daily decisions. I did the design of the reality personas and all workshops and work sessions with the creative team and strategic marketing.

For De Rechtspraak in Utrecht (the Dutch Judiciary / Council for the Judiciary) I worked as UX Lead on a quality and innovation project about digital accessibility with a user-centered design approach to let different parties work together in building a user interface with a great user experience. Here are some steps we took: defining ux principles, persona development, customer journey mapping, facilitating creatives and management, usability testing.

Thanks a lot to everyone who made this year a fantastic and pleasurable time. I enjoyed to work with you together and I am looking forward to a very nice next encounter.