Economizer: A Cooper service concept

People are looking for ways to economize in these uncertain times. We can all see the evidence of environmental crisis brewing alongside the economic downturn, and it's easy to feel powerless in the face of such global forces. With politicians and businesses seeking avenues to a sustainable future, Cooper wondered how design might help individuals cut costs while also encouraging behavior that was environmentally responsible.

This all started when Environmental Defense approached Cooper, asking us to imagine new ways to make it easier for people to save resources. We performed research throughout the Bay Area, then collaborated with Environmental Defense to model our findings and identify design opportunities. From this point of inspiration, we continued on our own, crafting a quick eco-friendly concept: Economizer, a service that helps consumers save money while making sustainable choices. The service consists of a core set of internet-aware services with optional components such as hardware data collectors, social networking applications, and dedicated smart phone interfaces.

Economizer: Scenario 1 on Vimeo
(Watch this video in fullscreen mode by clicking the icon in the lower right of the player.)

Continue reading...

A conversation about voice interactions

A while back, several of us in the studio had a little spontaneous discussion about voice user interfaces over email. We thought we'd share some highlights. Please pile on in the comments section.

Steve Calde: What are people’s experiences with voice user interfaces? [A client] is interested in learning more about how to document voice-activated systems, and wondered if we had any experience to share.

Alan Cooper: You could also suggest to them that voice interfaces are inherently bad and will never work very well.

Dave Cronin: Why are they inherently bad?

I agree that they often are bad, but it seems to be more an implementation issue than something intrinsic about voice commands.

Stefan Klocek: The reason they are inherently flawed is that we use our voice for other more important things in addition to the system level input we would like to give to our DVD player. There is no way for the voice interface to understand that the context has changed and that I am no longer giving it a command, rather I am now giving my child a command or am simply muttering to myself. Of course we could imagine a system in which we indicate context by saying “DVD player - pause”, but this is adjusting my input to the deficiencies of the system.

Continue reading...

Happy Halloween from Cooper!

This year, we continued our Halloween dress-up tradition with the theme of "monster mash-up." We did the ordinary challenge of coming up with a clever costume one better by mixing it with our love of puns. Everyone came dressed as a monster mixed with another costume idea.

The final set of realized costumes included The Creature From The Barack Lagoon, a skeleton out of the closet, a flying purple people greeter, a fairy goth mother, Robert Ghoul-et, a M(ummy)ILF, and some monsters of rock. We planned to crawl down to the Embarcadero for lunch, but with the possibility of rain, we lurched and lumbered across the street to dig up some pizza. Returning to our lair, we fired up the Wii for a monsters-of-mash-up-rock, Guitar Hero play-off.

The Drawing Board: Our Building's Elevator

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.

The Drawing Board: Episode One

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.

Taking the Call on Vimeo