The other night I attended a presentation/panel discussion about visual science communication. Well, I should say I had a terrific dinner at Wexler's first, then attended a presentation/panel discussion. These panels are better with a cocktail in you.

The event took place at swissnex. I think they like their name uncapitalized. I'm still a bit unclear about what swissnex is. The name struck me as delicious-sounding, like something you'd pair with Nutella in the morning. Swissnex. Your Toast's Best Friend.

I read their annual report and sat in their event space, so I know that they are a non-profit, they are staffed by lots of competent Swiss people, and they like to underline text. I'm guessing it's some kind of quasi-governmental Swiss cultural mission. Anyway, they host presentations about art and science, and do fun things like get Swiss kids to think about what 2023 will look like. All very wholesome.

The speakers at this event were a motley crew, and some are doing truly interesting work designing things to communicate science to the public. There was Michele Johnson, for example, a "public affairs officer" for the Kepler mission at NASA Ames. Kepler is a space telescope orbiting the sun, looking for Earth-like planets. She talked about how they manage to create a huge beautifully-rendered picture of a distant planet using only 6 pixels of image data. Obviously, it involves making a lot of assumptions. (I think the Kepler people are a tad jealous of Hubble, pumping out eye candy for the public, no need to emblazen "artist rendering" all over them like a Barry Bonds asterisk. I'd be jealous, too. It's the difference between a webcam from 1995 and a telephoto DSLR. But they do impressive work, despite their constraints.)

Another interesting panelist was Ryan Wyatt, the director of the planetarium at the California Academy of Sciences. He showed us the visualization his team created for their EARTHQUAKE!!! exhibit. Pretty sweet. And kind of mind-bending, because they're designing this uber-animation for the domed ceiling of the planetarium, projected with at least a half dozen overlapping light systems. They are an active and talented bunch, it seems. Six full-time staff work on science visualizations at the museum. (Edit: over-estimated the size of the team. Thanks, Ryan!)

There was also Joe Hanson, who does a PBS Youtube show called "It's OK to Be Smart." His main point: that creating engaging video content (about science, or drunk make-up tips, or whatever) is easy, can be done on a shoestring budget, and please please please release your stuff to Creative Commons so that other people can re-mix and re-use for free.

It ended late, so I wasn't in the mood to hob-nob too much. Plus that cocktail was beginning to weigh on my consciousness. But I left with a feeling that the problems the UX community face aren't so different from our compatriots doing science visualization. Sure, science viz is less concerned with usability and affordance (museum exhibits being a big exception). But we both have to synthesize input from subject matter experts. We both juggle the demands of clients and users and resources. We both strive to create artifacts that engage our users, drawing them in, immersing them in an experience, distilling complexity into its essential pieces. Our two communities, seemingly distinct, have a lot to learn from each other.

Our lives have a soundtrack.

Throughout the workday, we are immersed in a chorus of snaps, taps, squeaks, dribbles, drops and pops. These ambient sounds (and not so ambient from the guy who blasts death metal all day) play an important role in our design practice. Sound can be a muse or a distraction, but it’s always an influencer—of your mood, your process, and your outcomes.

Have you ever thought about the sounds that surround you at work? Ever wondered what story your workplace tells about you and your culture? Share the story of your design studio by recording the little (and not so little) sounds that make up your design practice, and help us create an artifact that tells the larger story of design. Each recording we receive will be uploaded onto the Sounds of Design audio stream adding to the first soundscape of design.

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At Cooper’s UX Boot Camp, held between March 25th and March 28th at Monkey Ranch in Petaluma, CA, Fair Trade USA looked to participants for ideas around how to raise awareness of their mission and inspire consumers to purchase Fair Trade products.

Fair Trade USA enables sustainable development and community empowerment by cultivating a more equitable global trade model through certifying and promoting Fair Trade products. Their work benefits everyone from farmers and workers to consumers, industry and the environment, and yet only 20-30 percent of Americans even know what Fair Trade means. Why? The issues are complex, but as students dug into this problem they identified key factors behind this disconnect, including a lack of brand awareness of the business case for Fair Trade, low brand adoption, and limited Fair Trade product presence in stores.

From those explorations, the following goals emerged:

• Motivate and inspire brands to adopt and evangelize Fair Trade practices.
• Put more Fair Trade products in front of consumers.
• Build “pop culture” awareness of Fair Trade to get more brands to buy into the movement.

To get there, student teams went beyond the initial concept of a website redesign and took on the bigger questions that lead to business transformation. For a look behind the scenes as the teams approached this challenge, check out the following video filmed during the Fair Trade USA Boot Camp, and read more to take a look at the Fair Trade USA ecosystem model and what the students came up with in the pitch decks that follow.

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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.

OneNote is, as you've seen in the prior posts (OneNote for Interaction Designers and OneNote for Interaction Designers: the Nuts and Bolts, awesome for design meetings. But it's also useful in research and client presentations, too.

How we use it in research

[From the video, slightly edited:] Having a laptop open in a research interview puts a barrier between you and the person you're interviewing, and the typing can be quite distracting and intimidating for the interviewee. But typed notes are searchable, making for very useful reference when you’re synthesizing your notes. OneNote is a nice compromise. With a Tablet in slate mode, we remove the physical barrier of the laptop, and as long as you have the pen in a “Create Handwriting” mode, you can later go back and search your notes as if they were typed. (The handwriting recognition is pretty amazing.)
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After technology received so much attention as a key differentiator for Barack Obama's reelection campaign, we asked Scout Addis, a former Cooperista, now the Director of User Experience at Practice Fusion, to discuss his experience working on the campaign. Scout sat down with Cooper Managing Director Doug LeMoine to tell us what he learned and to discuss how design and technology worked together to help win the election and change the future of politics.

Doug LeMoine : I'll start with a design cliché, but it really applies here. “We shape our tools, and then our tools shape us." Technology has really changed the way that people get information, form opinions, share those opinions, and so on. This seems like it has a special bearing on the nitty-gritty of a campaign, which is all about getting people involved, promoting a point of view, changing minds. So let's start with this: How did Obama for America use technology to win?

Scout Addis: Campaigns have traditionally relied on paper, phones, and volunteers to contact voters. Even in 2012 we still printed out a list of names, and then handed that to a person to make calls or knock on doors. They then recorded their notes on paper, and handed it off to someone else to do data entry to get that information back into our analytics systems. That is how phone banking and canvassing is still done.

But all of that’s changing. For example, the Call Tool allowed anyone to volunteer for a phonebank anywhere they had an internet connection. Someone would go to call.barackobama.com, and it would provide them with a script and a number to call. They would call that person, follow the script, and enter the results of the call on the same web page. That information would then be fed into our database and the results of those calls added to what we already knew about that voter. Once we knew what was going on with that voter, we could better determine where to make our next calls.

On election day alone one million calls were made using the Call Tool. That’s a lot of paper and data entry time that we eliminated, and our records were always up-to-date in real-time.

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by Cooper Interaction Designers: Patrick Keenan and Nate Clinton

The most exciting trend we've seen in the business world has been an eagerness to rediscover customers as people with interests, habits, and complex lives. In the burgeoning startup world tools have been created to help with customer discovery, or product market fit. In the corporate world, executives are rolling up their sleeves, paying attention, and using design thinking. Even seasoned non-profits are going beyond awareness campaigns and seeking to understand their advocates’ behavior.

One of the seminal thinkers on this kind of discovery is Clayton Christensen. Here he recounts an incident showing how an insight was lost on the sharpest of marketers:

After watching the clip, it is clear that the fast food company was talking to their customers, but they were just asking the wrong questions. Bringing them into one-way mirrored rooms and asking them, "what can we do to make our milkshakes better?" wasn’t working. The hero of the story (the user researcher) is observing customers, collecting data and looking for patterns, not just asking questions.

What distinguishes the hero from the fast food company in the story is:

1. He observes customers’ behavior in context, something the company didn't think to note
2. He asked the customers questions about what they do and why, as opposed to asking about the milkshake.

This is a great illustration of an incredibly subtle point. In user research interviews, some companies are tempted to ask "what features do you want in this product?" rather than trying to understand what these customers are hiring the product to do.

The investigator in the story is able to grok which attributes are on the rise (viscosity) and which have reached their peak (chunkiness); something that's near impossible to get at by asking about feature directly. In the end, he knows why different consumers are hiring milkshakes and can move forward building more desirable products for them.

Ah, the final day of IxD13 has come to an end. Day 4 was comprised of panels, debates, and rapid ingenuity cycles. It was a blast to cover this conference. If you missed any of the other days, check out our recaps from Day 1, Day 2, and Day 3. Can't wait to meet up again next year in Amsterdam!

Interaction Design Education Panel: Report Back

Dave Malouf, Haig Armen, Kristian Simsarian, Dianna Miller

Demand for Interaction Designers has grown, but because IxD is so new, education programs are being developed independently. With no single organization curating a design education program, there is little chance for design educators to share information and techniques. This panel was brought together to discuss patterns in design education, and as a platform for designer educators to connect with each other.

How do we make IxD training more widely available?

Lots of small design shops don’t have budgets to send people to conference or for extra training. And a lack of guidance can lead to people to seek other employment. At the IxD13 Education panel, these were some of the ideas discussed to build skills without breaking the bank.

Apprenticeship programs: (younger person paired with a senior designer) The junior designer would do smaller tasks and begin learn through doing.

Partner with universities: Students gain real-world experience by working on client projects.. Design studios get fresh ideas and build relationships with future recruits.

In-house training: How do you evaluate people’s aptitudes when they apply to an organization? Studios need better evaluation of applicants because people come with such mixed backgrounds.

There is a disconnect amongst what students think they are prepared to do, what they can actually do, and what employers want. Grads are not prepared to do high-level strategy. Many think they are, but it takes time to build that skill set.

Design fundamentals should be taught in middle and high schools, but if we can’t teach design curriculum in schools, we can host junior conference or 1 day UX Camps. Design principles are valuable to students of all ages. Design can teach people how to fail and how to take risks early in their development

How do we start to informally formalize where and how to find good teachers, mentors, programs, and studios?

We can spread good design education through our current network. Go to schools and give talks. As your relationship develops, schools will start to see you as a resource, and you can spread your design philosophy to new generations of movers and shakers.

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Each day at Ixd13 brings new and crazier events. The Internet of Things, beautiful failures, Interaction Awards went down on Day 3 of Ixd13. (Catch up on Day 1 and Day 2 and look ahead to Day 4 here.)

Making Meaning in an Internet of Things

By Carla Diana (Smart Design)

We’re no longer telling objects what to do and why – now, they sense, respond without our direction. Right now we are in the perfect storm for the Internet of Things (IoT) with accessible robotics, affordable sensors, wireless communications, object tagging, and easy broadband access.

What does this mean for design?

In 2008, the number of things connected to the Internet exceeded the number of people on earth. Through design, we have the ability to directly affect the future of the IoT.

The Mavericks in this space:

Smaller companies are putting products out through Kickstarter and other small funding arenas and trying IoT in an experimental way.

Here are some ideas they’ve put out:
• Twine: A brick with orientation, temp sensor, and other attachments. You create a set of rules online (like when to turn the thermostat up so the pipes don't freeze), and Twine obeys.
• Karotz: Tells you weather, traffic report, read your twitter stream, RFID tags to trigger actions (ex: give one RFID to your kid, when they come home they swipe and you get an email letting you know they are home).
• Pet collars that tell you when left your pet in the backyard unattended
• Houses that know when no one home, turns the power down.
• Sensors that makes it possible for everyday items to connect to the Internet.

What does this mean for our everyday lives? How does the IoT help us?

Learning about Self:
The IoT can help us track our own behavior and habits, eventually even leading us to a better understanding of our own identity. Take the kid's toy Furby. When Furby comes out of the box, it speaks a language entirely its own. But as it spends time with you, it learns about you, and eventually, their entire personality is based on their impression of you and your environment.

Learning about Others:
The IoT can bring people closer together, too. These objects can help foster a community through a shared connection in the IoT. There are pill bottle caps that glow to remind you its time to take your medication. If you miss it, the cap can play a ring-tone. If you still can’t see it, the cap will call your phone. Every month the device prints a progress report and shares it with your doctor and family members.

Learning about Surroundings:
Devices that can learn about our surroundings are becoming more and more prevalent like Nest the thermometer that learns about your, or Hue the light bulb by Phillips that can be whatever color you want it to be. These objects help to expose the invisible and access the inaccessible while allowing us to monitor and manage them remotely.

IoT can help us bring us back into the physical world.

Sitting at a keyboard or behind a screen is unnatural. We’ve spent a lot of time trying to virtualize the real world into the screen.

Principles for designing for IoT:

• Information overload is never fun
• Life now, data later
• Context is everything
• Communication defines personality. Be intentional about crafting that personality
• Playing nice with others. We could have a cacophony of gadgets, but that would be a mess. Instead, we need to make it easier for devices to communicate
• Knowing when it’s appropriate to borrow the screen

Methods for trying it out:

Now is your opportunity to experiment. There are few rules, and this is a beautiful chance to try new things.

Get more resources at the Smart Interaction Lab

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Yesterday we brought you designing strategy through a nonprofits eyes, ethical robots (depending on who you ask) and of course, the kegel organ. Here's what we have in store for you today.

Follow all of Interaction13 through daily recaps on the Cooper Journal. Here's Day 1,
Day 3,
Day 4.

Designing Everything But the Food

By Sara Cantor Aye (Greater Good Studio)

This year, in partnership with SAIC, Greater Good Studio designed a built a new public school cafeteria. Although that sounds like an architecture project, it really meant looking at the interactions between kids and food, staff, space, and other kids.

Kids will be kids

Sara Cantor Aye walked us through the process of researching elementary school cafeteria design in order to help schools serve healthier food, reduce waste and educate. Along the way, her team discovered some interesting things. For instance, kids want to eat what their friends eat and don’t deal with forced choices well (who knew?)

Making cafeteria food fun?

Their constraints were tough, but the breakthrough was going from a cafeteria line to serving courses to the table. The magic was in the discovery of unanticipated benefits; kids were finally eating their lunches! Cafeteria lunches were fun again, for students and staff.

The shared eating experience wins over all

By focusing on the kid’s experience, using head cams, interviews inside family homes, and observing the cafeteria, they discovered that kids waste food because they don't deal well with many choices on their plate. They were able to have a shared experience by having one item served to everyone at the same time. Just like a restaurant.

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