Ambidextrous Magazine

Malte always liked design – building cool stuff. It was not surprising that he was disappointed when he learned that the Technical University of Munich had finally succeeded in engineering all the fun out of engineering. That disappointment got him an average c-minus for his undergraduate part of his studies but it didn't let him loose his passion for design. Things turned around at Stanford where he found a crowd that thought about design in a way that finally resonated with him.

As a Ph.D. student at the Center for Design Research, Malte is exploring the role of emotions in design team interaction. Having suffered through a few bad team experiences he has started to wonder why in some teams designers get along so well with each other and even seem to do much better design. Malte's work is heavily inspired by John Gottman's research on marital interactions. In a famous study, Gottman was able to predict divorce based on the analysis of the emotions expressed during a 15-minute sample of an interaction between husband and wife. The prediction was accurate in over 90% of the cases. The question that drives Malte's research is: what if we could do the same with design teams and predict their performance based on a small sample of interaction?

Besides analyzing designers' emotional expressions, Malte misses his record player and all the records he left in Germany buried in some old cardboard boxes. He never misses an opportunity to eat good food and drink good wine. Yup, that's it.