🖖 Greetings!

While my Duolingo streak is on fire these days, our 2024 newsletter streak was violently disrupted after our September issue: The October issue was already sitting in the drafts, happily waiting to be sent out to the warm hugs of your inbox, when suddenly, boom, Trump is elected. Hours later, boom, German government falls apart. Oh and then there’s the racist billionaire going batshit crazy, an ongoing genocide, crazy fires — long story short, sending a company newsletter didn’t really feel appropriate for a very long time. 😵‍💫

Anyway. Welcome to 2025, things are still a big shitshow out there, but let’s face it: It is our responsibility to share some Considerate Design news with you, and we want to live up to this responsibility – so here we go!

What happened

💚 A new digital Home for Robert Habeck

As the German elections are now scheduled much sooner than expected we jumped in to support our friends at Bündnis 90 / DIE GRÜNEN for two focussed efforts over the last few weeks of 2024:

In just a few days, we launched ✨habeck2025.de✨, the central digital hub for Robert Habeck’s candidature, building upon the Design System and component library we created for gruene.de earlier in 2024.

In a parallel stream we launched design.gruene.de. In it’s current state this platform is primarily used to provide campaign resources and assets to the regional and local party chapters. In the long run, it will grow into the party’s centralised hub for all things design. We’re happy to be part of this big effort to systemise and modernise what has been growing for decades!

🤫 Currently, we’re also supporting on a third essential campaign touchpoint, but that shall not be named for now.

⚡ Strategy for E-Mobility

Shortly before Christmas we met with our long term partners at Electrive for a workshop on their product and content strategy. Big, tricky decisions were made, new headspace was unlocked, we’re looking forward to seeing these decisions manifest in their products over the next months! Big shout out to Marlene, who supported us as an editorial expert!

🦸 Diversity in AI

Since day one we dedicate part of our time at Ponder for pro bono projects that are in line with our values and mission – in the past that resulted in fundraisers for Ukraine, our work for rahrah or The League.

Some months ago we partnered with German journalist and digital strategist Anne-Kathrin Gerstlauer (TextHacks) who had initiated a collection of female and non-binary AI-experts so we can finally put an end to all-male panels, keynotes and workshops. Together, we migrated the initial list to a more scalable and privacy-compliant platform. The result now lives on ✨ki-frauen.com✨, where you can explore and filter existing experts and easily add new ones as well. As of today the list counts almost 500 experts – feel free to explore, share and add to it!

What’s upcoming

🚇 We’re just about to start an exciting new project in mobility / public transport together with our friends at Edenspiekermann and Interactive Applications. Stay tuned for more details!

🫣 Not everything is great — a bit of transparency

When we started Ponder (and this newsletter in particular), we agreed to always share transparently – and include the “not so great“ aspects as well. After all, our industry is still way too self-absorbed and full of “we are the greatest“ clubs. So — let’s change that! 🙃

Despite some really rewarding projects and amazing human connections, financially 2024 was an challenging awful year for Ponder. While there’s certainly reasons to be found internally as well, we definitely got to feel the overall decrease in demand the whole industry is currently facing. Organisations seem to be more hesitant and careful, waiting out how this current economic and political situation will evolve (understandably so). For us that meant: Quite some very promising leads got cancelled, many seem to be stuck in approval processes, overall project requests decreased.

For the better half of the year, our team was also reduced due to some ongoing health issues – which is tough on any team, but can be particularly tricky in a tiny team like ours.

So yeah, 2024 was a shitshow not only politically, but also in terms of Ponder revenue. But, as this newsletter proves, we’re alive and kicking 🥳 We made some adjustments internally to become a bit more resilient towards those outside impacts and are very much looking forward to a better 2025!

(Please let me know if this sort of content is of any value to you. It’s not exactly easy to share, so I’d love some feedback and thoughts on this! 🙇‍♂️)

In other news:

• Bye X: We decided to leave Twitter/X for good – feel free to join us on Bluesky, Instagram or LinkedIn instead.

• 2024 realisation: Our physical studio is not being used enough, that’s why we’re currently open to welcome an extra studio mate – if you’re in Berlin and are interested in a nice and bright desk by the water, let’s talk! 🤗

  

📺🎧 Something to watch and listen to

For your next commute, walk or couch time, here are some nice things to watch and listen to:

• 🤓 The talks from 38C3 are now available on Youtube. Great nerdy stuff, I can particularly recommend this talk on the (absurd and very much questionable) digital infrastructure of German prisons. (DE)

• 🗳️ Sticking with nerdy digital and political theme of this newsletter: Chaosradio (by CCC) has a great episode on what the German parties are promising in terms of digitalisation. (DE)

• 🛗 In previous episodes of this newsletter we recommended the podcast “Im Aufzug“ by Raúl Krauthausen, as well as the book “Wir von unten“ by Natalya Nepomnyashcha. Today, I’d like to recommend this great episode where both meet: Im Aufzug mit Natalya Nepomnyashcha (Netzwerk Chancen). (DE)

And with this: Thanks for following along! Let’s see if we can keep the streak up in 2025 🫠

Take care!

Peter