Category: Design Thinking

OpenAero – A open source design system for Bike Accessories

paschmann

After designing, building, rebuilding, and re-printing dozens of accessories for my bikes over the last few years, I wanted to create and share a open source design system for accessories for bikes that allows myself (and a community) to innovate and collaborate on these types of products. Here is a snippet from the readme file:

Our goal is to develop a modular mounting system for bicycle accessories — ranging from water bottle holders and lights to phone and cycling computers. Partially inspired by Gridfinity, this system provides a base platform and is intended to be stackable. The motivation behind the definition and open source nature of this project is to encourage community-driven design and innovation in the triathlon space. read more

The UX of Lego Interface Panels …

paschmann

After posting about the $100 million checkbox … I have been wondering about other really bad interface choices which have made it out into the world (and subsequently were the culprits of disaster). This is a nice article from the Interaction Magic team show casing the UX design of Lego Interface Panels, and some examples of (real world) bad patterns.

The UX of LEGO Interface PanelsLEGO interface panels are beautiful, iconic, and great for learning interface design basics. I bought 52 of them from BrickLink to explore the design, layout and organisation of complex interfaces.Read Moreinteractionmagic.com

Lithium Labs: 2011 – 2014

paschmann

I founded Lithium Labs in 2011. It was bootstrapped by the proceeds I received after selling Aschmann Media Group (Social Media Startup). The idea was born by recognizing the impact, and potential, mobile apps could have in the enterprise space. The original mission statement was:

“Lithium Labs provides a full suite of services for designing, developing, implementing and maintaining an enterprise mobility solution. We support all major mobile operating systems and hardware including iPad, iPhone Android, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Symbol and Intermec.”

The product/application portfolio of the company was seeded by a few mobile apps I had already released, and were being used widely in the SAP space. All of them were free from the various App Stores, the primary objective of these apps were for me to personally learn about the technologies and platforms, and the secondary objective, was to draw awareness to Lithium Labs as a company, and provide an example of what was possible. One of the most popular free apps which I developed under the Lithium Labs portfolio was “SAP Note Viewer”, with 12K downloads. read more

DIY – Patent Idea – Spring Water Bottle Cage

paschmann

Problem: In cycling (and other applications) water bottles are a variety of shapes and sizes. This often makes them difficult to get in or be contained in a traditional bicycle water cage. This attempts to resolve this by offering an “expanding” cage.

Fun but ultimately bad patent idea to create an expanding water bottle holder.

I made a couple models/3D prints to proof it out, but decided against it.

Excellent—thanks for sharing both the CAD diagram and video file. These materials are perfect for inclusion in your patent application as illustrative figures and demonstrations of your invention’s functionality.

Based on the visual references and the previous outline, here’s how we can now update the patent outline to include the new content and better illustrate your invention. read more

GE Healthcare: Design Thinking in the NICU

paschmann

I have been exposed to design thinking in a variety of ways over the past 13 odd years. From conferences, startups and projects – I have used the framework to develop and build services, software and hardware which incorporates one of the most important elements in the design: empathy.

Empathy ensures that the designers, developers and creators of these products “walk a mile in their shoes” and put the users at the center of the development lifecycle rather than technology, limitations or costs.

This TedX talk is a nice example of empathy in something critical that all of us can in some shape or form relate to, which is being born. The video centers around the design thinking process which went into the design and development of Neonatal Intensive Care Units and the equipment which nurses and parents have to deal with when a child is born prematurely. It is a great example of how empathy was an integral part of the process from start to finish. read more

Naming a business …

paschmann

When Kat was setting up her Laser Cutting business, we struggled to pick a name. Taking a more objective approach to the problem, we found some resources that could help. us decide on the right one.

Crafting
Making
Designing
Building
tinybird
onespark
Giantbulb		Red?spark
seaspark
glowspark
Spark fresh
freshspark
Raincat
robot9		Wet kitty/drykitty – xxx
Anchor cat
Geokitty
Polycat
Robot might be too impersonal or not crafty
SkinnyRobot
GoRobot

Open Source Project: Metric² for SAP HANA

paschmann
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Metric² is a web based, realtime dashboarding platform for SAP HANA, on SAP HANA.I recently gave a demo of the app at Demojam in Las Vegas (You can read my blog post about the event here). Metric² is a free app/download and this blog gives some insight into how it works, and how you can download and install it in your own HANA system:

Overview

Metric² is made up of 3 key areas:

Dashboards: Metric² can have multiple dashboards. Dashboards are designed as blank canvases, are quite flexible, and can contain widgets which are added can be simply dragged and dropped into their needed locations and also sized accordingly.

Widgets: Dashboards can have multiple widgets displayed. There are a variety of widgets including a range of predefined datasources (CPU, Memory, Disk etc.) but also include custom widgets (SQL, JSON, Yahoo) which can display a myriad of information to your team. read more

Why Demo Jam ROCKS – from a losers perspective ;)

paschmann

It was Tuesday night sometime back in 2009 at my first TechEd where I was sitting in the audience and really wishing I was standing up on stage, presenting something inspiring and innovative which would encourage the votes of the demanding audience of Demojam. Well, it took 4 years to creep over personal hurdles, family time and to gain an ounce of courage which persuaded me to post an entry in 2013, this blog gives some insight into what I did, what I would have done differently, and also why Demojam really needs people like YOU!

A couple of months ago (May through July) I went through the openSAP HANA course and was really impressed, not only by the DB, but more the HANA XS Engine as an Web/App server. Being a “learn by doing” kinda person I struggled to get the most out of the course content since it really didn’t apply to anything I was currently working on, until I realized the opportunity… As I described in my demojam presentation, I drank the HANA coolaid 🙂 Personally, it was not so much of the big data aspect that intrigued me, but rather this concept of the DB and the app server really being a single entity from a platform, as well as infrastructure perspective. Simple. I spent a couple weeks learning a lot more, since I had something to apply it against and started developing an app called Metric² read more

zSCN – A iPad SCN Community Reader

paschmann

After spending a couple of months traveling in 2012, I wrote a personal app for reading and following content created on the SAP Community Network. Although it was slightly buggy and ghetto, I found it way faster than firing up my MBA to check if a comment or something helpful had been posted in my local Netweaver Gateway hangout. I spent the last +- 6 months using the app and after reading a few comments on the new Idea place and in the forums, I decided a couple of others may find it helpful and set out to build a user friendly version. 

Now on to the app …. firstly, starting up the app you are presented with a list of spaces (thanks to Jason Lax for creating a helpful list here!), secondly, the app uses the RSS feeds from each SCN “Space” to curate the content, each time you select a space the content is cached on the device (in a little SQLite DB) and refreshes each time the space is opened. You can also select the number of items which are downloaded in each category (blogs, documents and forums). After logging into SCN using your SCN username/password, it will download your spaces, people and saved content. Keep in mind that you cannot “save” or create content from the app, since the SCN API’s are not currently publicly available (I am hoping for some change on this!). However, each item can be selected and the original content will be displayed on the website where you can login and respond/comment. You can also easily email the item to a friend in need, or tweet it if you are a social butterfly 😉  read more