According to popular belief, radio is dead.

It’s not; it’s just taking a different form. Instead of families gathering around a radio to hear the nightly news, people are staying informed by listening to the “All Things Considered” podcast or following Fareed Zakaria on Twitter.

So how does a radio program make the transition from on-air to online and define their role as journalists in the digital age? And how can designers influence how radio content is generated, shared, and consumed?

In the June UX Boot Camp, through experimentation and exploration, participants will redesign how listeners interact with radio content. They’ll conduct this examination through a radio program you may have heard on your local public radio station: Marketplace Money.

American Public Media’s Marketplace Money is a weekly public radio program airing locally on KQED that looks at matters of personal finance with wit and wisdom. In this particular UX Boot Camp, students will work with American Public Media's Marketplace Money to transform the experience of radio. They'll come up with new tools and models for engagement that encourage multi-platform participation, crowd-sourced content, and an entirely new type of relationship between listeners and show host.

Sound like a challenge you want to solve? Save your spot now.
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Yesterday a record  number of San Franciscans hit the streets biking to work. Here at Cooper, we are not only passionate about design but we are passionate about our bikes! We've got  them all:  Fixie, Townie, Cruiser, Cross, Self Custom-Welded, and Road. We love our bikes, and love working in a bike-friendly city like San Francisco.

Our lives have a soundtrack.

Throughout the workday, we are immersed in a chorus of snaps, taps, squeaks, dribbles, drops and pops. These ambient sounds (and not so ambient from the guy who blasts death metal all day) play an important role in our design practice. Sound can be a muse or a distraction, but it’s always an influencer—of your mood, your process, and your outcomes.

Have you ever thought about the sounds that surround you at work? Ever wondered what story your workplace tells about you and your culture? Share the story of your design studio by recording the little (and not so little) sounds that make up your design practice, and help us create an artifact that tells the larger story of design. Each recording we receive will be uploaded onto the Sounds of Design audio stream adding to the first soundscape of design.

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At Cooper’s UX Boot Camp, held between March 25th and March 28th at Monkey Ranch in Petaluma, CA, Fair Trade USA looked to participants for ideas around how to raise awareness of their mission and inspire consumers to purchase Fair Trade products.

Fair Trade USA enables sustainable development and community empowerment by cultivating a more equitable global trade model through certifying and promoting Fair Trade products. Their work benefits everyone from farmers and workers to consumers, industry and the environment, and yet only 20-30 percent of Americans even know what Fair Trade means. Why? The issues are complex, but as students dug into this problem they identified key factors behind this disconnect, including a lack of brand awareness of the business case for Fair Trade, low brand adoption, and limited Fair Trade product presence in stores.

From those explorations, the following goals emerged:

• Motivate and inspire brands to adopt and evangelize Fair Trade practices.
• Put more Fair Trade products in front of consumers.
• Build “pop culture” awareness of Fair Trade to get more brands to buy into the movement.

To get there, student teams went beyond the initial concept of a website redesign and took on the bigger questions that lead to business transformation. For a look behind the scenes as the teams approached this challenge, check out the following video filmed during the Fair Trade USA Boot Camp, and read more to take a look at the Fair Trade USA ecosystem model and what the students came up with in the pitch decks that follow.

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Designing for Unnatural Selection at the next Cooper Parlor

The Cooper Parlor is a gathering of designers and design-minded people to exchange ideas around a specific topic. We aim to cultivate conversation that instigates, surprises, entertains, and most importantly, broadens our community’s collective knowledge and perspective about the potential for design.

Upcoming Salon: WTF, Evolution? Designing for Unnatural Selection

Moderator: Zak Brazen, Creative Strategist, Brazenworks
Cost: $10
When: Thursday, May 23rd from 6:30-8:30 (doors open at 6)
Where: Cooper Offices, 85 2nd St, 8th Floor, San Francisco, CA
Get your tickets here.

Like it or not, the sixth wave of extinction is upon us. By the end of the century nearly 50% of all species on the planet will be gone. Most will perish simply because they do not have enough time to adapt to rapidly changing environmental conditions. But what if there were gadgets (or services) that would help plants and animals transcend time and make the evolutionary leap? What if there was a Whole Earth Catalog for the non- human among us (eat your heart out, Stewart Brand)?

In this seriously tongue-in-cheek Parlor, Creative Strategist Zak Brazen, of Brazenworks Design and Ingenuity Lab, will explore design opportunities for the near future, when plants and animals are your clients. Parlor participants will imagine, prototype and design tools, gadgets and services that give plants and animals the resources they need to cope with climate change in real time.

Disruptive? To say the least.

Save your spot now, before these seats become extinct.

Related Reading

• Curious what the Parlor is like? Check out this video of  "What Good is a Screen?" A workshop and talk about designing no UI solutions with Don Norman and Golden Krishna.
• Stay in touch about future Parlors, sign up here.

We’ve been getting a flurry of questions about the dates of our upcoming UX Boot Camps for 2013. For those inquiring minds, we’ve mapped out the rest of the year including partners, locations, and a brief description of the problem space. Every 3 months, we’ll release more information about the forthcoming UX Boot Camp with more details about the design challenge and what participants can expect.

Cooper's UX Boot Camp is a four-day deep dive into user experience design. This training has a dual purpose, both furthering the education of our design community and providing a non-profit with innovative design concepts to implement as they choose, free of charge. More information about the UX Boot Camp here.

Registration is open for all of these trainings. So if you’re interested, go ahead and reserve your space.

Marketplace Money

San Francisco, CA
June 11-14

Listening to someone advise you about personal finance feels a lot like your mom telling you to eat your veggies. In this UX Boot Camp, you will be challenged to change this experience and explore ways to empower a new audience to build a better life by taking control of their financial destiny.
Sign up for UX Boot Camp: Marketplace Money now

Wikipedia

Petaluma, CA
September 17-20

Encourage the spread of knowledge through mobile Wikipedia. Conceive of new ways to enable the contribution process by making it more approachable, more obvious, and less reliant on traditional inputs like typing.
Sign up for UX Boot Camp: Wikipedia now

Canine Companions

San Francisco, CA
November 19-22

Generate design solutions that improve the quality of life for veterans with memory impairments. Explore and create design solutions that build memory skills and aid communication between veterans and their service dog.
Sign up for UX Boot Camp: Canine Companions now

Related Reading

• To learn more about the Cooper U teaching philosophy at the UX Boot Camp, check out this article on GOOD magazine by UX Boot Camp creator Kendra Shimmell.
• Here are some of the concepts the most recent UX Boot Camp participants came up with for Edible Schoolyard Project.

We are always on the look out for posts, articles, and other pieces authored by Cooper U Alumni. The stories that they tell are often an insightful glimpse into what lessons stood out to participants. We were delighted to find this blog post by Meg Davis (Extractable) that calls out so many of the tips and meaningful moments from Design Leadership's curriculum. Take a look...

I recently had the pleasure of attending a two-day event hosted by San Francisco agency Cooper about design leadership. This discussion-based event covered great material about techniques for leadership and communication in the design industry. I would highly recommend this event to other design professionals who want to improve the effectiveness of their work.

Five insights stuck with me, and I’ve included concrete tips about how to live out these insights practically.

Be as intentional with people as you are with your work.

As user experience designers, we love researching people to find out their motivations for using web and digital products. We spend hours of primary research during each project, watching people use products in context of their work. However, we don’t put this level of attention towards our co-workers who we work alongside. If we took time to really understand and build empathy for the people we work with every day, we would understand what kind of pressures they face, what rewards them, what they need to make a decision, and what they need from us in order to trust us. If we can understand each team member’s skills and motivations, then we can leverage them to work better together. As the Cooper U team so beautifully put it, “Sometimes you need to slow down to speed up.”

Tip: At the start of each project, talk to each team member about his or her intentions for the project and figure out ways to support them, even in small ways.


Tip: Before going into meetings with your peers, understand and anticipate what they will need to feel engaged during the meeting and feel buy-in with respect to the work.

Read more about Meg's experience on the Extractable blog

Meg Davis attended Design Leadership training in February. This course was created and taught by Kendra Shimmell and Teresa Brazen. Learn more about this class or sign up for the next one here.

Want to share your Cooper U experience? We would love to hear about it. Send us a note.

After technology received so much attention as a key differentiator for Barack Obama's reelection campaign, we asked Scout Addis, a former Cooperista, now the Director of User Experience at Practice Fusion, to discuss his experience working on the campaign. Scout sat down with Cooper Managing Director Doug LeMoine to tell us what he learned and to discuss how design and technology worked together to help win the election and change the future of politics.

Doug LeMoine : I'll start with a design cliché, but it really applies here. “We shape our tools, and then our tools shape us." Technology has really changed the way that people get information, form opinions, share those opinions, and so on. This seems like it has a special bearing on the nitty-gritty of a campaign, which is all about getting people involved, promoting a point of view, changing minds. So let's start with this: How did Obama for America use technology to win?

Scout Addis: Campaigns have traditionally relied on paper, phones, and volunteers to contact voters. Even in 2012 we still printed out a list of names, and then handed that to a person to make calls or knock on doors. They then recorded their notes on paper, and handed it off to someone else to do data entry to get that information back into our analytics systems. That is how phone banking and canvassing is still done.

But all of that’s changing. For example, the Call Tool allowed anyone to volunteer for a phonebank anywhere they had an internet connection. Someone would go to call.barackobama.com, and it would provide them with a script and a number to call. They would call that person, follow the script, and enter the results of the call on the same web page. That information would then be fed into our database and the results of those calls added to what we already knew about that voter. Once we knew what was going on with that voter, we could better determine where to make our next calls.

On election day alone one million calls were made using the Call Tool. That’s a lot of paper and data entry time that we eliminated, and our records were always up-to-date in real-time.

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by Cooper Interaction Designers: Patrick Keenan and Nate Clinton

The most exciting trend we've seen in the business world has been an eagerness to rediscover customers as people with interests, habits, and complex lives. In the burgeoning startup world tools have been created to help with customer discovery, or product market fit. In the corporate world, executives are rolling up their sleeves, paying attention, and using design thinking. Even seasoned non-profits are going beyond awareness campaigns and seeking to understand their advocates’ behavior.

One of the seminal thinkers on this kind of discovery is Clayton Christensen. Here he recounts an incident showing how an insight was lost on the sharpest of marketers:

After watching the clip, it is clear that the fast food company was talking to their customers, but they were just asking the wrong questions. Bringing them into one-way mirrored rooms and asking them, "what can we do to make our milkshakes better?" wasn’t working. The hero of the story (the user researcher) is observing customers, collecting data and looking for patterns, not just asking questions.

What distinguishes the hero from the fast food company in the story is:

1. He observes customers’ behavior in context, something the company didn't think to note
2. He asked the customers questions about what they do and why, as opposed to asking about the milkshake.

This is a great illustration of an incredibly subtle point. In user research interviews, some companies are tempted to ask "what features do you want in this product?" rather than trying to understand what these customers are hiring the product to do.

The investigator in the story is able to grok which attributes are on the rise (viscosity) and which have reached their peak (chunkiness); something that's near impossible to get at by asking about feature directly. In the end, he knows why different consumers are hiring milkshakes and can move forward building more desirable products for them.

Ah, the final day of IxD13 has come to an end. Day 4 was comprised of panels, debates, and rapid ingenuity cycles. It was a blast to cover this conference. If you missed any of the other days, check out our recaps from Day 1, Day 2, and Day 3. Can't wait to meet up again next year in Amsterdam!

Interaction Design Education Panel: Report Back

Dave Malouf, Haig Armen, Kristian Simsarian, Dianna Miller

Demand for Interaction Designers has grown, but because IxD is so new, education programs are being developed independently. With no single organization curating a design education program, there is little chance for design educators to share information and techniques. This panel was brought together to discuss patterns in design education, and as a platform for designer educators to connect with each other.

How do we make IxD training more widely available?

Lots of small design shops don’t have budgets to send people to conference or for extra training. And a lack of guidance can lead to people to seek other employment. At the IxD13 Education panel, these were some of the ideas discussed to build skills without breaking the bank.

Apprenticeship programs: (younger person paired with a senior designer) The junior designer would do smaller tasks and begin learn through doing.

Partner with universities: Students gain real-world experience by working on client projects.. Design studios get fresh ideas and build relationships with future recruits.

In-house training: How do you evaluate people’s aptitudes when they apply to an organization? Studios need better evaluation of applicants because people come with such mixed backgrounds.

There is a disconnect amongst what students think they are prepared to do, what they can actually do, and what employers want. Grads are not prepared to do high-level strategy. Many think they are, but it takes time to build that skill set.

Design fundamentals should be taught in middle and high schools, but if we can’t teach design curriculum in schools, we can host junior conference or 1 day UX Camps. Design principles are valuable to students of all ages. Design can teach people how to fail and how to take risks early in their development

How do we start to informally formalize where and how to find good teachers, mentors, programs, and studios?

We can spread good design education through our current network. Go to schools and give talks. As your relationship develops, schools will start to see you as a resource, and you can spread your design philosophy to new generations of movers and shakers.

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