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Announcing the 10th Anniversary Edition

By Gerd Waloszek, SAP User Experience, SAP AG – March 3, 2010

Gerd WaloszekGreat events are often foreshadowed – and sometimes not-so-great events too. Opinions will differ on the question of what is and what is not a great event. Personal engagement or the impact of an event on one's own life are probably relevant indicators of what importance people attach to certain events. Based on these criteria, the upcoming 10th anniversary of the SAP Design Guild Website will definitely be a great event – not only for the SAP Design Guild team, but also for the initiators of the site and for the SAP User Experience team, for which the SAP Design Guild is the "public voice." We also hope very much that this will be a great event for the visitors of our Web site, particularly for those who have been visiting the site for years, maybe even from the very beginning.

We thought long and hard about how we could commemorate the 10th anniversary of the SAP Design Guild in an appropriate way. A sparkling wine reception would be nice, but the e-mail addresses of our newsletter subscribers tell us that our visitors are distributed all over the world, so only very few of them would actually be able to participate. Sending a virtual glass of champagne through our newsletter would not provide the "real" taste and would only reach our newsletter subscribers. So what could we do to reach all of our visitors? We finally came up with the idea of celebrating the anniversary and letting all our visitors participate in the celebrations by providing something that has been our trademark for so many years: articles about current topics and trends in the HCI, UI design, or user experience fields (pick the term that suits you best). However, we felt that single articles would run the risk of getting lost in the "realms" of our Website and not provide the "feel" of celebrating something. We therefore decided to place the "anniversary" articles in a common framework and publish them in the form of an edition called the "10th Anniversary Edition of the SAP Design Guild." This special anniversary edition differs from previous editions in an important way: It is conceived as a "growing" or "cumulative" edition. It starts off "small", with just one leading article and two initial articles that feature topics we have covered extensively in our so-called "highlight topics." Our intention is then to carry on adding articles in the course of the year, so that the anniversary edition will grow continually until it is finished by the end of this year or by the end of the anniversary year, depending on how many articles we have published by the end of 2010.

 

The SAP Design Guild in 2000 and in 2010

Figure 1: The SAP Design Guild in 2000 and in 2010

 

We cannot deny that our 10th anniversary edition looks somewhat meager at the outset, but we sincerely hope that this will change over the summer, as soon as further articles are published. To provide you with an idea of what kinds of articles will appear in this edition and which topics the articles are intended to cover, we have already compiled a list of prospective topics (see the edition for details). But be prepared for topics to change or be discarded, and for new ones to be added – we cannot guarantee that the edition will end up looking the way we are suggesting now. In addition, we hope that SAP UX colleagues will be inspired by the concept of this growing edition and will contribute articles – either about topics proposed by us or topics that they have chosen themselves.

On this note, I would like to wish all of our Website visitors a feast of good reading, a modicum of patience as they wait for the edition to grow, and – all of us – an inspiring and thoughtful anniversary year!

 

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