Originally from Sandnes, Stavanger's (in)famous little sister, I moved to Oslo in 2007 and studied a whole bunch of stuff before finding interaction design and that's when the pieces fell into place. I got my degree in UX and interaction design at The Oslo School of Architecture and Design in 2015, and spent the first six years of my career there.

I always knew I wouldn't be able to live that far away from the ocean (the Oslo fjord doesn't count), so in the middle of the pandemic, me and my husband packed up our two cats and our then 1,5 month old daughter in the car and moved back to Sandnes.

Having a now one and a half year old kid and having taken over my childhood home, there isn't really any time for hobbies anymore. But if I had time I would definetly go on week long hikes, travel, work on side-projects (I really want to learn tapestry weaving), go to concerts and festivals, go to the cinema and to the theatre and binge-watch series.

But it's also fun renovating a whole house.

I'm not kidding, it is sometimes actually fun :)

Illuminating Data was about allowing the public to experience digital data in the physical world.

When do you think Norwegians make the most cell phone calls during a year? This information was brought to light through a physical installation with data on the hourly amount of phone calls made by Telenor’s 2.1 million customers in 2013. By displaying this spatially the installation offered an opportunity to communicate big data to a wider audience.

“Illuminating data” revealed the repetitive patterns in our behaviour and the rise and fall in call activity throughout the day. Occasionally there were distinguishable hours and days that made it tempting to assume why we sometimes make more phone calls. The soft and rhythmic changes in the light formed a calming atmosphere, and the choice of materials and scale created a delicate and airy space. The final result was a large display system using light to portray differences in data. In this case it was visualising mobile communication data on a national level from Norway in 2013.

For my master's degree in interaction design, me and fellow student Mona Kleven Lauritzen explored how to communicate in an immersive experience a big dataset provided by research project DUDE at Telenor. We did the research, ideation, conseptualization and execution with a focus on looking into literature on human perception and data visualisation, researching and evaluating other interactive experiences and art and experimenting extensively with materials and mediums for communicating the data.

I truly believe in sharing skills and knowledge, and have had this mindset from early on in my career. Having had people that had the time and interest in sharing their field made me aware of the impact that can make on a personal level and in the company. Although having unfortunately neglected my frontend skills for the last years, I found great joy in hacking this page together during two evenings, and will definetly improve upon it

Origo is a part of Oslo Municipality that drives the municipalitys digital transformation. Origo was founded as a start-up and helps the municipality realize the Story of Tim which is a future vision of how the municipality will use technology to create a better everyday life for it’s inhabitants, in which they receive the services they need when they need them. This means that the municipality works as one, allowing inhabitants to use services regardless of internal systems and organization. And at the core of this lies allowing for a better flow of data across systems.

At Origo I was the UX-designer for both the Dataplatform and the Developer Portal. The dataplatform is a datalake and the Developer Portal is one of it’s user-facing touchpoints which offers a Data- and API registering and catalogue service. My role consisted of working closely with the teams and the product owner to research and analyze usage, be in charge of the UX- and UI-design, making sure that we did user testing and facilitated workshops with the teams, stakeholders or users. All this to make sure that we built the best tool for our users. I worked closely with the product owner to help make sure that we did the right things strategically for the product and the product area.

As well as my role as the UX-designer I was also during a period of time in the role of team lead for team Developer Portal

For this project, me and fellow UX designer Mira Sjølie researched how digital development is done throughout the different departments in Oslo Municipality. The research was summed up in three user journeys tied to the process of developing and releasing a new digital service highlighting key differences between having development through hired consultancy teams tied to the municipalitys central development department versus independent in-house development teams.

The result of this research and the user journeys was used to pinpoint the bottlenecs in the process and base a further conversation with the central development department in the municipality as well as with the supplier Sopra Steria

When someone is faced with life threatening illness it puts them and their caretakers in one of the most difficult situations imaginable. To add to this, trying to manage the symptoms of the disease as well as the side-effects of drugs treating the disease, drugs allieviating the symtoms and even drugs allieviating the symptoms of other drugs it becomes more than anyone could manage.

To highlight this I made a mapping of all of the symptoms and side-effects my mother experienced when she had cancer in correspondence with the drugs she took. This picture shows a fragment of this mapping as the whole thing covered two 1x3 meter posters.

This has continued as a side-project with my sister, Dr Mari Herigstad, where we are exploring how to take this further into a tool for patients and care-takers to get the information they need to empower them and get back a sense of control in such an extreme situation

To be able to make the best solutions for the users, it requires us to use the company resources in a good way. This was research was done to lay the foundation for finding the best way for the different teams on Origo to make use of the modernized Norwegian Population Register, to use as a foundation to give feedback to the Norwegain Tax Administration on how the data should be made available.

Sometimes the distance between developers and designers is not only measured in physical distance, but also in mindset and in time. To put this in perspective, this was back in 2015 and design systems were relatively new, at least in norway. The process from idea to finished product was rarely collaborative and sketches were often made, placed in backlog and picked up in the worst case months later.

After experiencing the frustration with misinterpretation of the intended UX and discontentment with the process, colleauge and frontend developer Elisabeth Irgens and me took the initiative to build a design system from scratch for mybring.com, completely under the radar of the big bosses.

This was a design system with developer as it's main user but also empowering designers to learn to use the material, i.e. the code, that the designs are made up of to prototype and co-create the UX and UI together with developers.

This is still my proudest achievement, and Mybring Design System is still going strong up to this day.

Posten Norge is a Nordic postal and logistics group that develops and delivers integrated solutions in postal services, communications and logistics, with the Nordic region as its home market. Posten Norge’s vision is to make everyday life simpler and the world smaller.

At Posten Norge I worked on Mybring, a self service tool for ordering and managing logistics for small and medium sized businesses. As a designer I was in charge of identifying the user needs and through working with the product owner and scrum master, align them with the business goals and the technical constraints and possibilities, making sure that I came up with design solutions that were feasible, viable and desirable. I started out as a UX-designer, but through close collaboration with a frontend developer, I got my first experience as a designer/frontend developer hybrid.

I'm passionate about company culture, having seen a the good, the bad and the ugly of it. I believe empowering and trusting people is the first step in succeeding. This is about the precedense the leadership takes, the way the company treats the weakest, it's interns and juniors, the way consultants are treated as part of the community or something outside of it, how hierarchical the company is and if the strategy and vision focuses on both internal and external output and is owned by everyone.

Linkedin
ingrid.herigstad@gmail.com