My wife and I lived in Berlin from September 2001 to December 2002 so she could do a year of research for her PhD in Art History.
I was quite lucky to meet and work on projects with two companies in Berlin, and to find some interesting freelance design work. I also taught Information Architecture at HyperIsland School of New Media in Sweden, and at the Academy of Converging Media in Berlin. You can read more about my instructional work here.
Eye Square is a small usability and branding company. I worked with them on a software usability project in English for eBay, and two large international usability and brand image studies for the Ford Motor Company.
For Ford, I was the English-language Test Manager for two website redesign projects. I conducted about fifty hours of usability interviews in London, did most of the data analysis of the English and German tests (for about 40 test subjects overall), and wrote the final reports for both projects.
For eBay, we did some standard usability testing on a piece of desktop software. For this project, I translated test materials and helped with the final data analysis and report writing.
I learned a lot from working with eye square, who are very experienced usability professionals, and are one of the only German companies who integrate usability methods into brand studies.
defcom webdressing is a small design boutique, although they have been around since 1994, and work with some very large clients. I worked with defcom for about 8 months, and was the Information Architect on a large database project for Netpack-Europe, the European Semiconductor Manufacturing Association.
I enjoyed working for Defcom, and felt very lucky to be able to work on a big IA project for them, and to learn some new approaches at the same time.
I managed to improve my German from “halting” to just “pausing frequently, with a few fairly competent stretches.” Put me in a café or restaurant, or at a train station counter or supermarket, and I’m basically fine; start a conversation about German politics and I can smile and nod politely.