The other night I attended a presentation/panel discussion about visual science communication. Well, I should say I had a terrific dinner at Wexler's first, then attended a presentation/panel discussion. These panels are better with a cocktail in you.

The event took place at swissnex. I think they like their name uncapitalized. I'm still a bit unclear about what swissnex is. The name struck me as delicious-sounding, like something you'd pair with Nutella in the morning. Swissnex. Your Toast's Best Friend.

I read their annual report and sat in their event space, so I know that they are a non-profit, they are staffed by lots of competent Swiss people, and they like to underline text. I'm guessing it's some kind of quasi-governmental Swiss cultural mission. Anyway, they host presentations about art and science, and do fun things like get Swiss kids to think about what 2023 will look like. All very wholesome.

The speakers at this event were a motley crew, and some are doing truly interesting work designing things to communicate science to the public. There was Michele Johnson, for example, a "public affairs officer" for the Kepler mission at NASA Ames. Kepler is a space telescope orbiting the sun, looking for Earth-like planets. She talked about how they manage to create a huge beautifully-rendered picture of a distant planet using only 6 pixels of image data. Obviously, it involves making a lot of assumptions. (I think the Kepler people are a tad jealous of Hubble, pumping out eye candy for the public, no need to emblazen "artist rendering" all over them like a Barry Bonds asterisk. I'd be jealous, too. It's the difference between a webcam from 1995 and a telephoto DSLR. But they do impressive work, despite their constraints.)

Another interesting panelist was Ryan Wyatt, the director of the planetarium at the California Academy of Sciences. He showed us the visualization his team created for their EARTHQUAKE!!! exhibit. Pretty sweet. And kind of mind-bending, because they're designing this uber-animation for the domed ceiling of the planetarium, projected with at least a half dozen overlapping light systems. They are an active and talented bunch, it seems. Six full-time staff work on science visualizations at the museum. (Edit: over-estimated the size of the team. Thanks, Ryan!)

There was also Joe Hanson, who does a PBS Youtube show called "It's OK to Be Smart." His main point: that creating engaging video content (about science, or drunk make-up tips, or whatever) is easy, can be done on a shoestring budget, and please please please release your stuff to Creative Commons so that other people can re-mix and re-use for free.

It ended late, so I wasn't in the mood to hob-nob too much. Plus that cocktail was beginning to weigh on my consciousness. But I left with a feeling that the problems the UX community face aren't so different from our compatriots doing science visualization. Sure, science viz is less concerned with usability and affordance (museum exhibits being a big exception). But we both have to synthesize input from subject matter experts. We both juggle the demands of clients and users and resources. We both strive to create artifacts that engage our users, drawing them in, immersing them in an experience, distilling complexity into its essential pieces. Our two communities, seemingly distinct, have a lot to learn from each other.

Upcoming Cooper Parlor:Designing Culture: The Secret of Great Teams & Organizations

Moderator: Teresa Brazen & Kendra Shimmell
Cost: $10
When: Thursday, July 11th from 6:30-8:30 (doors open at 6)
Where: Cooper Offices, 85 2nd St, 8th Floor, San Francisco, CA
Get your tickets here.

“We’re way off schedule. Everyone is disengaged. No one is onboard with the vision.” Sound familiar? What if you could create great products and services without all that drama? What if there was a secret sauce for stellar team dynamics?

From “Grilled Cheese Fridays” to “Ship It Days”, in this Cooper Parlor we’ll talk about curious, compelling ways that people from every role in organizations are creating inspired cultures. We’ll look at how culture impacts teams and what they create together, what constitutes a “healthy” culture, and trade tips and tricks for fostering environments we all want to work in.

Participants will share their own success stories and challenges, so come prepared to be an active part of the conversation. Then, we’ll do some hands-on exercises to come up with creative new practices to take back to our organizations and teams.

If you lead a team, want to lead, work remotely, build stuff, wrangle people daily, or just want to hear about (and create!) invaluable techniques for solidifying team culture, don’t miss this Cooper Parlor!

What is the 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. Save your spot now.

Related Reading

• Curious what the Parlor is like? Check out this video of the WTF, Evolution? Parlor with Zak Brazen
• To stay in touch about future Parlors, sign up here.

What: Cooper’s Open House during AIGA's SF Design Week Studio Crawl
When: Wednesday, June 26th from 6pm-9pm
Where: Cooper’s Loft Studio, 85 2nd St, 8th Floor, San Francisco, CA

Each summer during San Francisco’s Design Week we celebrate our craft with events and open studios. This year Cooper is especially excited to open its doors and welcome friends and colleagues to its brand new loft space in one of San Francisco’s coolest landmark buildings.

Drop by our studio to share drinks and eats, and explore our new space. See how Cooper is using walls, windows and screens to innovate — play on our white boards, and maybe even win a prize for your sketch or idea as we riff on the topic of Designing the Future. There has never been a more exciting -- or imperative -- time to create new designs that improve our world. Be a part of the conversation about how you, Cooper, and the rest of our industry will influence the next decade of design.

Guest blog post by Zak Brazen, our May Cooper Parlor moderator and Creative Strategist for Brazenworks

Prefabitats for polar bears? A jet pack for pandas? Bionic bunny ears for Bengal tigers? It's amazing how much ingenuity 55 people can exhibit in two short hours. But that's just what can happen when you facilitate a motley crew (wink) of design professionals, biologists, and technologists toward a common goal. Entitled, WTF, Evolution? Designing Unnatural Selection, the Cooper Parlor on May 23rd explored the science and fantasy of creating gadgets for animals to 'leap frog' the 6th wave of extinction. As Karolina, one of our attendees put it, "Still buzzing after today's Parlor & lively presentation. Pandas need design advocates too!"

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Cooper’s new Design the Future series of posts opens the door to how we think about and create the future of design, and how design can influence changing technologies. Join us in this new series as we explore the ideas behind agentive technology, and summon a metaphor to help guide us to the next interface.

Part 1: Toward a New UX

If we consider the evolution of technology—from thigh-bones-as-clubs to the coming singularity (when artificial intelligence leaves us biological things behind)—there are four supercategories of tools that influence the nature of what’s to come:

1. Manual tools are things like rocks, plows, and hammers; well-formed masses of atoms that shape the forces we apply to them. Manual tools were the earliest tools.
2. Powered tools are systems—like windmills and electrical machines—that set things in motion and let us manipulate the forces present in the system. Powered tools came after manual tools, and took a quantum leap with the age of electricity. They kept becoming more and more complex until World War II, when the most advanced technology of the time, military aircraft, were so complex that even well trained people couldn’t manage them, and the entire field of interaction design was invented in response, as “human factors engineering.”
3. Assistive tools do some of the low-level information work for us—like spell check in word processing software and proximity alerts in cars—harnessing algorithms, ubiquitous sensor networks, smart defaults, and machine learning. These tools came about decades after the silicon revolution.
4. The fourth category is the emerging category, the new thing that bears some consideration and preparation. I have been thinking and presenting about this last category across the world:
   Agentive tools, which do more and more stuff on their own accord, like learning about their users, and are approaching the artificial intelligence that will ultimately, if you believe Vernor Vinge, eventually begin evolving beyond our ken.

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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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