DESIGN LEADERSHIP

Design leaders often grow out of yesterday’s designers. You are a designer with brilliant soft skills? Perhaps, you’ll be offered a leadership position someday. It has become common for our profession that Heads of Design, UX Directors, and Team Leaders appear with minimal people management experience or education. That’s why we are destined to discover bits of this new skill set the hard way.

1. You won’t be nice to everyone

One of my favorite sayings is, “If you want to hug the whole world, buy yourself a globe.” Before I became a manager, I had observed other managers’ work and believed I’d be much more humane…

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I used to live in Lviv for 5 years, and I’ve been living in Berlin for 1,5 years. It’s long enough to explore the beauty of both cities and fall in love with modern architecture. This article is a subjective mix of the most fascinating buildings I recommend staring at.

Let me give you some context. The end of the 19th — beginning of the 20th century is called the Belle Époque (Beautiful Epoch). It was a period of peace, prosperity, and innovations. European architecture before the outbreak of the First World War had two primary directions:

• Eclecticism — attempts…

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I used to hate Baroque. I always associated it with the corrupt politicians’ perverted taste and fussy villas with overwhelming golden decoration. Recently, I tried to understand Baroque again, and it turned out to be an eye-opening experience. Oh, how wrong I used to be…

Baroque flourished in the 17–18th centuries. It emerged owing to Catholic Church and served as its “brand identity.” Striving to compete with Protestantism, Catholics employed emotion in architecture to better appeal to a broader audience. Baroque was the first European style to spread globally (unlike its predecessors: Romanesque, Gothic, or Renaissance).

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Tourists admire Lviv as a whole but rarely understand the value of each piece. Besides, half of the oldest buildings are located outside of the crowded center and don’t get the attention they deserve. So, I’ll give the floor to overlooked sites as well as a few popular ones. Plus, I drew schemes to help you recognize the architectural styles of the past.

Byzantine and Romanesque Period

13th century — High Middle Ages in Europe. A time of the Fourth Crusade and the rise of the Mongol Empire led by Genghis Khan. The largest country in Eastern Europe was Kyivan Rus, an ancestor of…

DESIGN THINKING

When you’re working on a product, what is more crucial than choosing the right features to develop? However, the exercise often turns into a spectacle of team voting. As a result, decisions change many times down the road. Let’s talk about the pitfalls of popular prioritization techniques and approaches to reducing bias and disagreement.

How familiar is this scenario: the team employs modern decision-making methods and performs all design-thinking rituals, but the result remains guesswork. Or this: Soon after having prioritized all features, the key stakeholders change their mind and you have to plan everything again. …

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Cherkasy, the center-most city of Ukraine, was founded in the 13th century and had a wooden castle, but now the oldest surviving buildings date back to only the 1850s. Locals don’t perceive Cherkasy as a nice destination, but I’ll show you plenty of sites worth gazing at.

Masterpieces of Horodecki

The city’s most valuable buildings are credited to the talent of Władysław Horodecki (1863–1930), an architect of Polish origin, often called “Ukrainian Gaudi.” He contributed greatly to the architecture of Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, and designed several buildings in Cherkasy.

Hotel “Slovianskyi”

Our first stop is the hotel “Slovianskyi,” colloquially known as the “Blue Palace.” It…

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I’ve been to Uzhhorod just once before this trip, and it didn’t impress me, but the night setting can change everything. How did we get there so late? Well, it was a conscious yet a bit crazy decision. My fiancée, Oksanka, and I — both wild about exploring new places — wanted to order wedding rings from a Ukrainian jeweler based in Uzhhorod. So, we booked a ride via BlaBlaCar and departed after midnight from Lviv.

We wanted “a real adventure” and didn’t plan to stay at the hotel. This was our plan: departure from Lviv at 1 a.m.; around…

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Vintage industrial facilities always stand out from a modern cityscape: textured brick walls, slim tubes, themed sculptures, coats of arms, arched windows. So, this summer, I was exploring non-touristic parts of Berlin in pursuit of overlooked industrial beauty.

1. Westhafen (1914–1927)

Google Maps, Wikipedia (in German)

Westhafen, the biggest river port in the city, has been attracting my attention since my first visit to Berlin. One can hardly overlook this huge industrial area with massive tanks, colorful piles of containers, and cranes.