Shouts out to all the newly minted Cooper U alumni in the South Pacific! We had students from Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and Malaysia, representing a wide array of specialties: Marketing, development, visual design, company ownership, user research, and yes, interaction design as well.

Some travel snafus had some students arriving later, but we forged ahead with Day 1.

Following are some images and video from the fun and intense learning week we spent together.

When it was all said and done, students told me that they loved the pace and the content of the course, specifically appreciating learning...

• The power of pair design, and what to do if your company doesn't do it formally
• Why personas work
• How we make personas so they're useful design and communication tools
• That building anti-personas are sometimes necessary
• The principle of iterating in the cheapest medium possible
• How we align Agile methodologies and Goal-Directed Interaction Design

In a personal email, one student even told me it gave him fresh new eyes for understanding how to think about and critique his freshly-downloaded iTunes 11. He said he felt more equipped to have rational design conversations about things now, which is as much as any teacher could ask for.

Congratulations, again, to a vibrant class for crossing the...

(and thanks to April Hague-Smith for the lovely horse sketch. :)

Want a Cooper U in your part of the world?

Cooper loves the opportunity to travel to new places and teach how it is we do what we do: we learn a lot in the process. If you're around the world and think there's a classroom's worth of people eager to attend, let us know and we'll try and get there as soon as we can.