According to popular belief, radio is dead.

It’s not; it’s just taking a different form. Instead of families gathering around a radio to hear the nightly news, people are staying informed by listening to the “All Things Considered” podcast or following Fareed Zakaria on Twitter.

So how does a radio program make the transition from on-air to online and define their role as journalists in the digital age? And how can designers influence how radio content is generated, shared, and consumed?

In the June UX Boot Camp, through experimentation and exploration, participants will redesign how listeners interact with radio content. They’ll conduct this examination through a radio program you may have heard on your local public radio station: Marketplace Money.

American Public Media’s Marketplace Money is a weekly public radio program airing locally on KQED that looks at matters of personal finance with wit and wisdom. UX Boot Camp participants will use this show as a case study to transform the experience of radio by giving listeners and broadcasters new tools and interactive roles to explore a topic that touches everyone – money.

Sound like a challenge you want to solve? Save your spot now.
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We are always on the look out for posts, articles, and other pieces authored by Cooper U Alumni. The stories that they tell are often an insightful glimpse into what lessons stood out to participants. We were delighted to find this blog post by Meg Davis (Extractable) that calls out so many of the tips and meaningful moments from Design Leadership's curriculum. Take a look...

I recently had the pleasure of attending a two-day event hosted by San Francisco agency Cooper about design leadership. This discussion-based event covered great material about techniques for leadership and communication in the design industry. I would highly recommend this event to other design professionals who want to improve the effectiveness of their work.

Five insights stuck with me, and I’ve included concrete tips about how to live out these insights practically.

Be as intentional with people as you are with your work.

As user experience designers, we love researching people to find out their motivations for using web and digital products. We spend hours of primary research during each project, watching people use products in context of their work. However, we don’t put this level of attention towards our co-workers who we work alongside. If we took time to really understand and build empathy for the people we work with every day, we would understand what kind of pressures they face, what rewards them, what they need to make a decision, and what they need from us in order to trust us. If we can understand each team member’s skills and motivations, then we can leverage them to work better together. As the Cooper U team so beautifully put it, “Sometimes you need to slow down to speed up.”

Tip: At the start of each project, talk to each team member about his or her intentions for the project and figure out ways to support them, even in small ways.


Tip: Before going into meetings with your peers, understand and anticipate what they will need to feel engaged during the meeting and feel buy-in with respect to the work.

Read more about Meg's experience on the Extractable blog

Meg Davis attended Design Leadership training in February. This course was created and taught by Kendra Shimmell and Teresa Brazen. Learn more about this class or sign up for the next one here.

Want to share your Cooper U experience? We would love to hear about it. Send us a note.

(and we're giving you 20% off to celebrate!)

A few years ago, we designed a course to help individuals and teams learn how to work together better, knowing that if we could teach them how to be master communicators and collaborators, they’d get better products and services out into the world. Over the past few months, we’ve been experimenting with the content of that class, gathering feedback from alumni, and brainstorming how to take it up a notch. We’ve come up with a new and improved curriculum that goes beyond collaboration and communication, introducing participants to the skills and practices to become leaders in their organizations. We renamed the course to reflect this new emphasis.

At its core, Design Leadership remains a fantastic hands-on workshop for designers and managers alike to collaborate and learn from each other. But now, we’ve added more leadership techniques like using storytelling to communicate the value of your work and ways to impact the culture of your organization. This is the course your career wants you to take.

To entice you, we’re offering 20% off our first Design Leadership training on February 27-28. Just use this code when you register: DL20213

Announcing our 2013 Cooper U class schedule!

It’s that time again: New Years resolutions scribbled in notebooks, jammed packed yoga classes, fridges suddenly full of healthy grub to make up for creeping holiday waistlines. For most of us, those resolutions start out with a roar and end, well, with a wimpy fizzle. That’s why it’s critical to commit to specific plans now while you’ve got that New-Years-I’m-gonna-conquer-the-world hutzpah. Even if you don’t conquer your whole list by December, at least you can check a few things off with pride. The most important thing about resolutions is simply that they get us moving forward.

Enter Cooper U. We can help you with that momentum problem. We’ve got a fantastic line up of classes this year that can help you hone your design leadership, interaction design, and visual interface design chops. And, if you need practice on a real-world problem, we have an incredible lineup up of UX Boot Camps coming.

So, let us make actualizing resolutions easy for you. Try these on for size, and see which one(s) sparks your New Year’s fire most:

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In our March Boot Camp, you'll have a chance to work with Fair Trade USA, North America’s leading third party certifier of Fair Trade goods. You'll be challenged to conceive of digital tools to enable advocates and influencers to ignite consumer demand for Fair Trade products to create a fundamental shift in the way goods are traded and purchased. And you'll do all that in a creative classroom setting on the 50-acre organic farm of Cooper founders, Alan and Sue Cooper!

Design is a messy process, full of ambiguity and competing choices. This makes learning how to design hard. Learning tools and methods can only take you so far; to be a great designer, you have to practice thinking critically and applying those tools.

That’s the philosophy behind UX Boot Camp, our four-day crash-course in user experience design that gives you a real-world problem to solve along with a toolkit to tackle it. You’ll take your ideas from inception to design with the mentorship of our best teachers and active feedback from a real non-profit client.

The best part is that the impact of this course goes well beyond the classroom.

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2012 was the inaugural year of the UX Boot Camp, so we were overwhelmed by the response that we got from so many different organizations that were interested in partnering with us in 2013. We were deeply impressed by the amount of consideration that went into each entry. Many thanks to all of the organizations who contacted us, please stay in touch for our 2014 Boot Camps.

It is with great pleasure we announce that Fair Trade USA will kick-off our 2013 UX Boot Camps from March 25-28

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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.

Featured on GOOD

How do you learn to think through a problem rather than apply a method by rote?

Learning design methods in four short days is a tall order. In this article, Kendra Shimmell goes deep into the teaching techniques she and her fellow teachers employ to encourage students of Cooper's UX Boot Camp to think through the challenge they face and arrive at their own solution. Through this exercise, students build problem-solving muscles that serve them in their career and in their life.

From the article

“Finding an innovative solution often involves getting lost. It's like setting out to find treasure with just a map and a compass—you may encounter mountains, seas, and wild animals along the way, and how you choose to navigate those challenges releases your particular gifts and skills. Likewise, the Boot Camp provides its participants with a goal and tools to self-direct their thinking.”

Read the full article over at GOOD

Related Reading

• Up for the challenge? Join us in Petaluma, CA March 25-28 to be a part of UX Boot Camp: Fair Trade USA
• Here's how the most recent UX Boot Camp went down: UX Chicken turns students into teachers

12/11/12 Update:Thank you to all the amazing organizations who were interested in partnering with us for the UX Boot Camp. We received many thoughtful inquiries and were deeply impressed by the work of each organization. Unfortunately, due to time constraints as we approach the end of the year, we are no longer actively seeking partnership for the 2013 Boot Camps, but stay in touch for future opportunities to partner with Cooper for the 2014 UX Boot Camps

What is UX Boot Camp?

Cooper’s UX Boot Camp is a four-day course in our user experience design methodology for designers, developers, and product managers. UX Boot Camp is also an opportunity for nonprofits to explore a real world problem of theirs that can be helped by design and technology. Under the guidance of Cooper senior staff, Boot Camp students perform an in-depth field study surrounding the problem, and the nonprofit receives approximately six distinct design explorations at no cost.

Who attends?

Design practitioners, developers, product managers, marketers, usability professionals, and decision makers who have some experience creating products but want to learn new design methods, get hands-on practice, and help a nonprofit along the way.

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The UX Boot Camp is a partnership between Cooper U and a non-profit facing a real world problem that can be solved by digital technology. Students are immersed in a four day field study resulting in design concepts for the non-profit to implement as they choose. We asked our most recent Boot Camp partners, The Edible Schoolyard Project to share some of their experience with us.

What was most surprising about the UX Boot Camp experience?

The number of design students participating. I always assume it’s easier to teach in small numbers, but clearly that was not the case as the productivity was so high. It seems like the group of 30 + designers learned as much from each other as they did from Cooper instructors.

What stood out to you about the final presentations?

The presenters had a strong sense of our organization our work. Our challenges felt like their challenges.

What was the impact of seeing your organization through someone else's eyes (Cooper U students)?

The students had a solid understanding of our work and our challenges, which created understanding between us and allowed for open-minded dialogue about their design solutions.

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