Comment on XING Prototyping Days: Shaping the future of business networking by Expart

Jens Pape, CTO XING AG

Prototyping on the roof. (Photo: Moritz K?nigsbuscher.)

From Wednesday to Friday last week, the XING office was turned on its head as staff from around the entire company joined forces to work on the XING Prototyping Days!

At this point, you may well be asking yourself, what are the Prototyping Days? Well, they’re an opportunity for everyone in the company – from HR through to customer support and on to QA – to take three days out from their usual work to get involved in a project of their choice, be it alone or as a team. Around forty projects were put forward, with people signing up to projects they found interesting.

The idea behind the Prototyping Days was to develop visions to help shape the future of business networking in the year 2015 by coming up with prototypes, pre-alpha versions, or even just a concept.

The event was kicked off in true style by Robert Powell who gave an inspirational and informative talk on prototyping based on the decades of experience he has amassed in designing automobile prototypes. After that, people split up into their groups, stocked up on nibbles and drinks, and got to work on their ideas and designs.

The designers, some of whom had been getting things ready for several weeks, then started building prototypes, line for line, long into the night. The deadline was 3 p.m. on Friday, at which time the entire company went to the alte Oberpostdirektion around the corner to attend the presentation session where each team was given five minutes to present their idea and convince the jury that their prototype was the best on offer.

The projects that were presented covered a wide spectrum, ranging from mobile apps to offline concepts and on to visionary designs. There were ideas on how expand and improve user profiles, personal networks, business life in general, as well as insights into how online and offline networking could be shaped in the future.

Presenting on stage.

The presentation session was followed by a party which gave everyone a chance to talk about their favorite presentations, which came in all shapes and forms such as trailers, sketches, and slideshows. This gave the jury time to choose the winners of the various categories (such as “most innovative”) who were given great prizes during the award ceremony for all the hard work they had put in.

All of the great ideas have now been taken on board and will be used by XING as a form of inspiration and source of ideas for the future. Since then, things have more or less returned to normal here in the office and we’ll be launching a new feature during this week’s release.

You’ll find more pictures on pictures on flickr!

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