While I have never had that one particular dream job – not for lack of aspiration, but for an abundance of it – reading about IDEO was a revelation. The more I read, the more I felt the work environment at IDEO could have been custom-made for me personally by people from IDEO themselves. It was curious to see how so much of what I've done over the years turned out to resonate with IDEO's philosophy – and with the scope of the Human Factors department in particular.

Prior to presenting a selection of projects, I therefore would like to give a short, more narrative account of my career so far – more narrative than my CV, that is.

As a kid of two dedicated teachers and a brother to three sibblings, I was born curious, compelled to sympathy and fond of play. Emulating my older brother, I happened to learn everthing early. Any new game, sport, challenge or skill around – I sure wanted to be in on it. The reason I mention this is that I think it shaped my personality up until today. It eventually taught me the gratification of being bold and curious, the feeling of achievement that comes from learning and understanding, and the potential that lies in questioning the given and trying out new things.

Thus, in high school for example, I grew really excited about foreign languages, and took every single language class offered. Every new language is like a new access to the world to me, a new way of seeing the world, through the eyes of others. In making sense of the world through language, all humans are united. And the diversity in our ways to do so testifies to both our ingenuity as well as the contingency of our own particular mindsets – a contingency we need to be aware of in order to truly communicate, I think.

After graduating from the scientific-mathematic high school, I performed community service as a research assistant at the Institute for Applied Ecology in Freiburg. The institute conducts research in fields like “Energy & Climate“, “Sustainable Products & Material Flows“, or “Infrastructure & Enterprises“, and consults various governments, companies and in particular the European Commission. Working there was extremely interesting and reinforced my intention to work in a progressive, sustainable work environment one day. I also learned about the fundamental role that media play in informing and affecting human perception and behavior.

Following my desire to better understand that role, I then chose to study “European Media Studies“ – a joint degree at the University of Potsdam, the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam and the University for Film and Television Babelsberg. The program is designed to bring together both theory and practice, and methodologically not too far from Stanford's D-School, actually. (Today Potsdam University even houses the D-School’s German branch.) Most importantly, its curriculum is inherently project-based: almost every seminar is accompanied by some ambitious practical project and vice versa. I learned how to derive and transfer knowledge gains from theory to practice and vice versa, to work with external partners, meet important deadlines and collaborate most effectively on a team.

[Speaking of collaboration: Besides being highly interdisciplinary, the study program was also very new at the time. Our faculty therefore had a very strong and active interest in everybody's feedback, which in addition to the limited number of students created a very unique and collaborative atmosphere. As one of the student representatives, I got to participate all the more in that exciting and hands-on pioneer phase, submitting suggestions, making cases and planning events for example.]

While many people associate Media Studies with the usual mass media only (Internet, TV, newspapers...), the discipline actually covers much more than that. Architecture, art, design, technology, tools, means of transportation, infrastructures, interfaces, maps, language, symbols, diagrams, etc… all can (and need to) be understood as media that shape our experience of the world. Thus, Media Studies essentially are a transdisciplinary meta discipline, and just like IDEO they are particularly attentive to human behavior and interaction with and within the world.

My Bachelor Thesis for example was on the alleged acceleration of life that many people feel, the perception of "the world spinning faster and faster". My Master Thesis tried to understand the rationality, the “consumer behavior“ of Scientologists – with the help of the French anthropologist Pierre Legendre, whom I interviewed in Paris.

But there's another congeniality between IDEO and my academic training: story telling. In Potsdam, I had the opportunity to produce a number of short films, co-organized a short film festival in Berlin and, with others, conceived an alternate reality game for Germany's largest producer of TV series. And of course, my love of stories and story telling played a big role when I decided to apply for Graduate School in German Literature / Media Studies at Princeton. While the program here is certainly more academic, I’m still eager to get to be creative, as well as keep in touch with the real world. For example I had the chance to take an amazing conceptual art class with UbuWeb founder Kenneth Goldsmith. Or more recently, after having taught German for a year, I teamed up with a start-up called StudyBlue and wrote a paper on how to improve vocabulary learning online – based on my experience and my students’ valuable feedback.

Now, the following is certainly not a real designer portfolio. It will give you a more visual idea of my projects though, and show that “in spite of“ being a highly trained academic, design is not a closed book to me. Truly believing in the idea of design thinking, I would love to not only read in that book, but to apply my skills, knowledge and passion to help writing it further – and become a part of the story of IDEO.

The dissertation project I currently persue (but would indefinitely defer in case of a dream job opportunity like IDEO) investigates the cultural aging of things – as opposed to their material aging. How do things age? How do they age well, badly, quickly, slowly or not at all? How can we explain the widespread retro trends and cultural nostalgias of our time? Vinyl, instagram, polaroid, digital technology in analog design, beards, road bikes, retro fashion, hipster culture in general, expensive historical TV series, movies like “Super 8“, “Hugo“, “The Artist“ or “Midnight in Paris“, computer game emulators, 8-bit music, pixel-, Super 8- and found footage esthetics, Minecraft, Lana Del Rey, etc... Also, if the only way we can access the past is through media – then how do specific media affect our particular relationship to the past? What role do so-called New Media play? What's so new about them? When will *they* grow old?

The dissertation project I currently persue (but would indefinitely defer in case of a dream job opportunity like IDEO) investigates the cultural aging of things – as opposed to their material aging. How do things age? How do they age well, badly, quickly, slowly or not at all? How can we explain the widespread retro trends and cultural nostalgias of our time? Vinyl, instagram, polaroid, digital technology in analog design, beards, road bikes, retro fashion, hipster culture in general, expensive historical TV series, movies like “Super 8“, “Hugo“, “The Artist“ or “Midnight in Paris“, computer game emulators, 8-bit music, pixel-, Super 8- and found footage esthetics, Minecraft, Lana Del Rey, etc... Also, if the only way we can access the past is through media – then how do specific media affect our particular relationship to the past? What role do so-called New Media play? What's so new about them? When will *they* grow old?