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Buzzkill
by Tim McCoy
I’ve been struggling for days to put into words my reaction to the launch of Google Buzz. But the phrase I can’t get out of my head is “HOW could they screw up THIS MUCH?” Well here’s how: Google took Gmail, one of the most widely used web services on... (Continue)
Alternate dimensions
by Daniel Kuo
If you’re a typical designer working in the software world, the majority of products you’ll create will have strictly two dimensional interfaces — length & width only, pixels on the screen. As interfaces have evolved over the years many have gained a very simple kind of "depth": lighting effects, drop... (Continue)
An Insurgency of Quality
by Alan Cooper
Dave Hussman, one of the leaders of the post-agile movement, recently hosted a one-day conference on the topic of “Redesigning Agility”, and invited me to give a plenary talk. The focus of the conference and my talk were how to integrate agile development with interaction design. I was very... (Continue)

Storytelling with found objects

by Doug LeMoine on February 4, 2009

christoph_neimann_sushi.jpg

When I saw Christoph Niemann's recent piece in the New York Times, I LEGO N.Y., I was struck by the way that simple physical objects, accompanied by text, can beautifully illustrate ideas.

christoph_neimann_flatiron.jpg
Both images are from Christoph Niemann's I LEGO N.Y.. He has a blog called Abstract City on nytimes.com.

At Cooper, I find that I'm often looking for new ways to activate design thinking, or to clearly and directly represent ideas. It can be easy to think too literally, to work over the same terrain again and again, and this is why I'm inspired by work like Niemann's — it gets back to basics. It speaks clearly, but also invites interpretation. It reminds me of Bill Buxton's discussion of "storytelling with found objects" in Sketching User Experiences:

As a child, when your parents got a new refrigerator, did you not take the box and transform it into a fort or spaceship? We have all seen and done such things — made free associations between objects and their meaning and purpose. The key observation here is that such transformations are as fundamental to design thinking as they are to childhood imagination and discovery.

I'm curious to hear from the design community: Are there techniques that you've used to radically reconsider familiar concepts? Or to vastly simplify the communication of your ideas?

Filed under: Innovation, Strategy

Doug LeMoine

Doug LeMoine is a director of interaction design at Cooper. In seven years at Cooper, his designs have helped orthopedic surgeons more precisely wield bone saws, revealed risk in mutual fund portfolios, and created a friendly way for elderly people to monitor and communicate about their health.


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