When: October 8-11
Where:
Monkey Ranch (the 50-acre farm of Cooper founders Alan and Sue Cooper)
5223 Red Hill Road, Petaluma, California 94952
Venue details (training will be hosted in the Workshop Barn)
Map (45 minutes drive north of San Francisco, CA)
Nearby hotels
Register!

At Cooper, we believe you learn best by putting new skills into practice solving the kinds of challenges designers face on a daily basis. That’s why we designed UX Boot Camp, a four-day crash-course in our own design methodology that gives you a real-world problem to solve along with the toolkit you’ll need to tackle it. You’ll take your designs from idea to inception with the mentorship of our best teachers and active feedback from a real client. Better yet, this particular UX Boot Camp will happen in a creative classroom setting on the working farm of our founders, Alan and Sue Cooper. Need another reason to sign up? This is a chance to hone your craft while also providing invaluable design solutions to a nonprofit in need, Alice Water's Edible Schoolyard Project (ESY). In the end you’ll walk away with a solid, portfolio-ready concept and skills you can put to work for your own projects.

Cooper's UX Boot Camp is an intensive design training for design practitioners, developers, product managers, marketers, usability professionals, and decision-makers who have some experience creating products but want to take their skills and processes to the next level. In short, it’s where people become design leaders. The class is built around hands-on activities, conducted in pairs and small teams. Participants will learn to:

• Set the stage for effective collaboration
• Define product and service ecosystems
• Conduct design research using both lightweight and in-depth techniques
• Synthesize research data into actionable next steps
• Model personas
• Storyboard future concepts
• Design a seamless framework for a multi-platform experience (web and mobile)
• Learn how to go beyond features and design for engagement
• Facilitate effective design reviews
• Pitch and present design concepts to stakeholders

Along the way, participants will also learn critical leadership and communication skills. Plus, you’ll help a nonprofit discover new, creative ways that technology can engage students, teachers, and local leaders connected to their organization.

Our interest in solving real-world problems and our hands-on teaching approach makes us especially excited to partner with Waters’ Edible Schoolyard Project (ESY). By providing teachers the tools to implement garden and kitchen-based curricula in K-12 classrooms, ESY is addressing the obesity epidemic, enhancing the educational experience with interactive lesson plans, and spreading awareness about sustainable agriculture and local food systems. Not coincidentally, Alan and Sue Cooper live on a 50-acre former dairy farm called "Monkey Ranch" in West Petaluma, California. The Coopers make their farm available to young farmers who are committed to reshaping our food supply chain into one that is more sustainable and organic. The shared goals of the Coopers and the ESY Project make it only natural that we’d host our upcoming UX Boot Camp at Monkey Ranch!

To inspire great work while learning, the UX Boot Camp course is part friendly competition. Each team will present their design concepts to a panel of ESY and Cooper judges, and all the concepts will be given to the nonprofit at the end of the course.

Our previous UX Boot Camp with the American Red Cross of Greater Columbus was a huge success. Participants created mobile app concepts to engage volunteers through social micro-fundraising events and more. To get a glimpse of what that UX Boot Camp was like, check out the final concepts pitched by the teams, this post by a participant, or these photos from the event.

Cooper U's UX Boot Camp: October 8-11

Monkey Ranch, 5223 Red Hill Road, Petaluma, California 94952
Venue details (training will be hosted in the Workshop Barn)
Map (45 minutes drive north of San Francisco, CA)
Nearby hotels
Register!

TESTIMONIALS

"I enjoyed the "experiential" aspect of the training - the hands-on approach, mixed with presentation/teaching, was a combination that really helped me learn and retain the information. I was able to interact closely with others and work as part of a team. In most trainings, I just take notes and forget most of what I "learned"." - Andrew Kallemeyn, The Lampo Group

“The workshop training was grounded in delivering real value to stakeholders. The expectation of a concrete deliverable created a positive stress that motivated learning, engagement and team building amongst attendees.” – Shawn Crowley, Atomic Object

"Most conferences are set up to give you a shotgun of bite-size information as you move from session to session. UX Boot Camp was critical to me in that it was comprehensive and consistent with its teaching. I got the whole picture of UX skills alongside some in-the-trench experience." - Matthew Ensor, The Lampo Group

"The combination of hands-on experience working with a nonprofit, and team members from other industries with varying levels of expertise was excellent. Volunteerism is important to me personally - the dedication and how fully vested our team was in delivering the best solution for the non-profit was not only educational but a refreshing change to our day-to-day jobs. Cooper did a great job to use the tools taught in the class to build empathy (as if any additional empathy was needed) for the Red Cross which further showed the power of using design principles in all aspects of life!" - Andrea Robillard, Johnson & Johnson Consumer Companies