Cooper Journal: The Drawing Board: Our Building's Elevator

The Drawing Board: Our Building's Elevator

by The Editors on October 31, 2008 | Comments (2)

Here at Cooper, we find that looking at the world from the perspective of users and their goals makes us notice a lot of bad interactions in our daily lives. Being solution-minded designers, we can’t help but pick up a whiteboard marker to scribble out a better idea. (Just ask our partners and friends—we really can’t help ourselves).

This sort of thing makes a fun thought exercise, so we thought we’d share it with you as a series of narrated slide shows we’ve called “The Drawing Board.” These aren’t meant to be slick, highly-produced demos—just some ideas we’ve thrown up on the board to stimulate thought and discussion. So…enjoy. Discuss. Design.

The Drawing Board: Our Building's Elevator on Vimeo.
Credits: Chris Noessel and Stefan Klocek.

2 Comments

Tamlyn

November 3, 2008

Even better: build a horizontal shaft to transport the elevator from the 0-21 shaft across to the 21-27 shaft, thereby eliminating the dual elevator problem and being very cool in the process!

Jan

November 3, 2008

What a beautiful episode. Thanx a lot! :)
Jan
--
http://iatelevision.blogspot.com/

Playing with iBooks

by Nick Myers

At Cooper, we love to share what we learn in our consulting work. We've published and socialized techniques and tools for doing interaction design in our books, at conferences, and through Cooper U. Recently, Apple released the iBooks Author platform, and a few of us have been giving it a test run. The platform itself has lots of potential. There is much to improve, but the possibilities are interesting and it's too early to critique it too strongly. There's been much talk already about the EULA and whether or not this will disrupt education. It's too early to make that... Continue...

The eye of the brainstorm

by Alan Cooper

In our modern digital environment, all businesses have a great competitive need for creative thinking that far exceeds our industrial forebears. In the quest for an institutional source of creativity, the brainstorming session, where several people meet to have fresh ideas, has emerged as the front runner. Brainstorming can be fun, and some prominent consulting firms have prospered proselytizing this technique, but it has a remarkably thin track record of success. While people think and behave differently when they are in large groups versus when they are alone, I also believe that people behave still differently when they are in... Continue...