How and where did you learn such interactive designs?

Flo: This kind of interactive design (like we did for the cover) I learned by myself, the rest at school.

Mauri: I certainly did not learn interactive design at school like Florian. The best lesson in interactive design that we had at school was this game with a F-18 Hornet interface. Otherwise, I learned interactive design here at Nofrontiere. Thanks. But what I think you can learn or to be taught is the technique, design is a different process. It is a creative process, dialogue and curiosity, open-minded, self-ironic, passion, and this you cannot learn … you must cultivate it.

Flo: There are some criteria of design you can learn and some you can’t. I learned many (good) things at school and they are burned into my brain. Now I try to make something which is different to my school training.

What are your ideas on interactive design and which personal principles do you follow in creating a design?

Flo: Basically, I try to help people to communicate with each other by preparing the information in the right way. Or I create interfaces which let the user understand the information easily (make it transparent). Anyway interactive design can also be entertaining (depends on the context).

Mauri: I can’t really explain… I think there is an idea, which can be good or bad (let’s say you can like it or not) and then there is the creative process which is something very personal, but extremely sensible and dependent on the context. There is something you should not forget as a Designer … there is always a story to tell and if it is a good story there is someone who will listen to it ….

We can see lots of client works that Nofrontiere has dealt with in the book titled ‘Nofrontiere Operating System‘. What do you think is the factor that fascinates so many Nofrontiere clients?

Flo: At the moment, good people meet in one place. The result is special as you will see in our next book.

Mauri: It is a constant exchange of dialogues, people, experiences, language, food, music, time… It is a kind of collective soul, which depends not only on the people but also on the place … we will try to explain this in our next book.

What are you most interested in right now?

Flo: I am interested in too many things. I don’t know where to start so I do almost nothing (in my freetime). I would like to make some music (Many years ago I was a drummer in a typical unknown teenager independent band) – electronic music and some nice web-design. I will start to make my own homepage for which I am actually looking for a domain name. It will be a mixture of showing some of my work as well as some unimportant but nice things.

Mauri: …errors and the wonderful world of random images.

We’d like to ask you about the web design in Vienna, Austria in general. What is hot there now? And what do you think about the web design scene in Austria?

Flo: Check out the Silverserver!

Mauri: The Austrian web site which I check more often is Der Standard Online where I can find all the movies which are currently playing in Vienna in their original language.

The last question. Do you have any plans for the near future?

Flo: Going to London in September for one year, together with my girlfriend.

Mauri: Try to go to the beach for some days in summer, buy a digital camcorder, going to London after flo gets there … last but not least I must go to the dentist on the 10th of July.

Nofrontiere
Address: Zinckgasse 20-22, 1150 Vienna, Austria
Tel: +43 1 985 5750
https://www.nofrontiere.com