Open Access

Monika Blattmeier

• Aesthetic business processes. The motivation for the project presented is to conceptualise a business process as an aesthetic medium that enriches companies, society, and individual lives with new ideas of beauty. For this, it is important to make the spectrum of business processes visible by no longer understanding business processes as exclusively technical systems. In his works, the Nobel Prize winner for literature John Steinbeck focuses on the milieu of simple workers and yet recognises "And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world." Visualising. Business process management seeks to understand processes by reducing them to their essential actions, studying them, and making the interplay of those actions as efficient and effective as they can be. This reductionist approach extends to visualising as the chosen method of this project as well. A pattern language will be recreated that enables visual learning in education at universities and in companies. The patterns of this pattern language enable us to explore the essence of processes by developing a holistic view of them, communicating them, and finally, creating them for businesses. PatternPool. In a recent experiment conducted at the University of Applied Sciences Emden/Leer, students of mechanical engineering, together with industry partners, were asked to visualise the spectrum of business processes, and identify the first patterns and link them in a pattern language. A PatternPool database was created for the explication, documentation, and dissemination of the patterns as best practices. Visual learning. Through these patterns, knowledge in the world can be combined with knowledge in our heads, and the intangibility of processes can be visualised. Collective inspiration can be set free through learning together from past experience and from others. Therefore, a concept for visual learning based on the pattern approach is to be developed for business process management. Creativity. The true value of the project is revealed when we understand business processes holistically through visual thinking and learning based on a pattern language, which leads to free-spirited creativity at all organisational levels.