Here in San Francisco the sun is shining, the sky is clear and we are already looking forward to this summer. But we're not just looking forward to more good weather; we can't wait to welcome summer interns.

What better place to apply what you've been learning than in the collaborative Cooper environment? We don't have wireframe monkeys here, you and your ideas and input will be applied on real projects for real products.

Our internship program is a 10-week paid position in San Francisco for current undergrad, graduate, or recently graduated students. We're looking for both interaction and visual designers who have a mix of self-motivation, design skills, open-mindedness, curiosity, empathy, and thirst for knowledge.

As an intern, you'll get a chance to take part in user research, strategy creation, concept explorations, and detailed design. Along the way, mentors will guide you through project work and help you reach larger career goals. We'll make sure you're set to roll up your sleeves and get involved, and that you get as much as you can out of your experience at Cooper.

Sound like something for you? Send a résumé along with a letter stating your internship
goals and portfolio samples (PDF or link to your website) by March 15th to internship@cooper.com.

This article was written by Aaron Ganci, who recently received his Master of Fine Arts in Design Development from The Ohio State University's Department of Design.

Alan Cooper and Kendra Shimmell recently took a trip to the Midwest and stopped by The Ohio State University for a visit. This trip served double-duty as both a chance for Kendra to spread the word about Cooper's new Midwest-centric activities and for Alan to give the keynote address at Ohio State's Center for Enterprise Transformation and Innovation (CETI) Industry Day. More importantly, both Kendra and Alan spent a lot of time throughout the week engaging in discussions with the students and faculty at Ohio State, and with professionals in the local community.

A few highlights from the week:

Alan and Kendra chatting with a small group of educators and local business leaders.

Cooper's UX Bootcamp

Cooper is partnering with the American Red Cross of Columbus for their UX Bootcamp, where training in user experience design, digital product definition, and research will take place. Participants will learn the process and thinking behind designing products and services that have that spark of magic, all while doing something good for their community. The output of the bootcamp will be given to the American Red Cross of Columbus disaster preparedness and intervention initiatives.

Kendra Shimmell, Tamara Wayland and I recently enjoyed some Spring weather in beautiful Rio de Janeiro while sharing methods for interaction design, collaboration, and communication in an agile environment with forty employees of Globo.com, the Internet branch for Latin America's largest media conglomerate.

The team knew that Rio would be warm this time of year, but what really amazed us was the warmth and hospitality of the people we met. Andrë Braz, Globo.com's User Experience Design Manager and Art Director, and his team were engaged and inquisitive, and really hungry for ways to take their already successful site to the next level of efficiency and innovation.

During the course we talked about how to effectively integrate user experience design into an agile environment, and shared techniques for collaboration and communication that are lightweight to create but provide big impact. The Cooper team showed Globo.com a blueprint for defining and designing digital products and services that centers on users, but within the context of business needs and implementation realities.

Here are a few snapshots from class:
Participants quickly grasped the value of focusing on goals and behavior patterns when developing personas.

A cross-functional team works together to storyboard the key contexts and moments in time that their primary persona will interact with the product they are designing.

A student sketches design concepts for the mobile experience.

The enthusiasm carried over into the final day of the week, during which we were joined by close to 80 Globo designers, developers, product managers, and executives. We can't wait to go back (and I am still dreaming of the feijoada we had on Friday afternoon).

Thank you Globo, and thank you Rio!

Alan, Chris, Kendra, and Tamara joined Innova, Russia's premier game development studio, for design education sessions and industry events focusing on the future of gaming and technology in Russia and around the world.

Kendra led interaction design and design communication and collaboration sessions for Innova's designers and technologists. The team immediately began using their new skills, creating a road map to establish goal directed design throughout their organization.

We co-hosted sessions with members of the Russian design community focusing on the current state of design in Russia and the world and the future of interaction design and technology.

Now that we're back in San Francisco, we realize, after all the opinions, ideas and laughter were shared, we are as inspired as our newfound design friends in Moscow to continue developing world-class methods for user-centered design.

Visual Design at Cooper. Video credit: Andreas Braendhaugen, Music: Dave Zohrob

Get a quick look at the office of Cooper with some thoughts on the role of visual design in digital interfaces by Nick Myers, managing director of visual design and branding.

I had the opportunity to sit in on our new Design Communication & Collaboration class, and it changed my perspective about how to work better with people! Instead of trying to persuade collaborators to work with me, this course focused on empowering them to better work with me. The class goes beyond design as an outcome, beyond pictures and pixels. It discusses design as an act of facilitation, digging into why great products and services get upended while tackling the difficulties of communication and collaboration that get in the way of great design.

Have you ever been on a project team that had a killer idea, ran with it at full speed, and came up with some amazing work, only to have a silent stakeholder finally voice their concerns and “torpedo” the project 8 months down the road? Had the team been able to address these concerns early on and often, the meltdown could have been avoided and the idea come to fruition. The message of the class is clear and powerful: Successful design is as much about how well you work with others as being a good designer.

Credits: Faith Bolliger, Golden Krishna, Peter Duyan, Jayson McCauliff, Suzy Thompson, Nick Myers

If you own a car in a city like San Francisco, you've probably experienced that particular mix of rage and despair as you drive around your block for the umpteenth time, looking for a parking space. Maybe you've even thought to yourself, "There has got to be a better way!" as you finally bumper car park along the curb blocks from home. Thanks to the folks at Streetline, there is a better way.

Streetline worked with Cooper to create Parker, an app for iPhone and Android that helps drivers easily locate and pay for available parking. When we began, Streetline was an early-stage start-up operating under intense pressure to deliver to market. We worked closely with their developers to bring predictability and order to a process that is wasteful (of resources and time) in addition to being stressful.

Big congratulations to the Parker team for shipping an amazing product &emdash; and securing an additional round of funding!

Get Parker in the App Store, and learn more about our work with Streetline in our case study. Speaking of parking, you can even auction off your spot with Parking Auction.

Savant. Rockstar. Gifted genius. Many of the ways we talk about creative work only capture the brilliance of a single individual. But creativity also thrives on diversity, tension, sharing, and collaboration. Two (or more) creative people can leverage these benefits if they play well together. Cooper’s pair-design practice matured over more than a decade, and continues to evolve as we grow, form new pairs, and learn from each other every day. While no magic formula exists, all of our most successful partnerships to date share remarkably similar characteristics...

Foundation

We play by the same rules

There’s many different ways people could work together, but when everyone’s playing the same game (and has a shared understanding of the ground rules), things flow more easily. The freedom to make up the rules as you go, according to your own whim creates chaotic, unstable, unpredictable systems. It’s hard to get work done when the basics are continually questioned.

David Bornstein a journalist who studies social innovation, recently described play in the New York times: “Play requires the acquisition of a complex set of skills. It’s not just about exercising or letting off steam. It’s about making agreements with others as equals, stepping into an imagined structure, and accepting that structure even when things don’t go your way.”

At Cooper we’ve got a loose set of agreements which give structural support for playing and producing together. We’re all consultants, doing user-centered design, following an archetypal process (adapted to a given project’s constraints), and we maintain specific roles for working together. These serve as the agreed upon structure or rules of the game.

How it’s played is left to the players. We value lots of autonomy within big boundaries. Every team settles on their own ways of working together for day-to-day project work. It’s as informal as a sketch of a calendar and a quick conversation around expectations. We make explicit what we need to get out of our time together, and what we’ll get done in our time apart. Everyone shows up on time, and ready to work. A quick goal-setting chat gives focus and clarity to design meetings. Starting on the same page gives permission to time-box discussions, and park unresolved questions. In meetings we’re present, actively contributing, and moving the project forward. Shared agreement about the game we’re playing removes stress around participation and supports a more trusting relationship.

Cooper is pleased to announce the arrival of our newest directors: Kendra Shimmell, Director of Design Education & Training Services, and Tamara Wayland, Director of Client Relations. Kendra and Tamara will spearhead important initiatives for Cooper’s growing strategy and design consultancy. We are excited about the skills, talents, and energy that they bring to Cooper’s mission of helping clients create products and services that delight users.

About Kendra Shimmell

As Director of Design Education & Training Services, Kendra Shimmell will lead initiatives for training and mentoring in the practice of design. She will oversee our design practicum, Cooper U, which includes popular courses on interaction design, visual design, and design communication. Kendra also plans to expand our training and mentoring offerings to include courses and workshops on research methods, interaction design techniques, service design, agile design practices, and the integration of design into organizations of all sizes. Kendra plans to reach out to the broader design community, sharing Cooper’s proven design practices with the community, as well as searching out innovative research and design strategies to fold into the Cooper design practice.

Kendra is excited about her new role: “The design community has multiple challenges: How do we respond to the demand for ‘quicker, faster, now’ while maintaining the integrity of the user experience? How do we fold design into the new organizational model of integrated development teams? How do design teams understand the shifting contexts of design problems that involve mobile design, service design, interaction design, and industrial design? I see Cooper U as a place for us to experiment with ways to meet these business and design challenges within the context of the design community.” She is especially excited about working on these challenges at Cooper: “Cooper is a firm investing in the articulation of the practice of design, and sharing with and learning from the greater design community.”

Kendra has over ten years of design experience across a broad range of products, including health care systems, retail environments, medical devices, durable goods, consumer electronics, financial services, and enterprise management applications. She has extensive public speaking, facilitation, and training experience, including talks at SXSW and the IXDA Interaction conferences. Kendra joins Cooper from Adaptive Path, where she was Lead User Experience Designer.

About Tamara Wayland

As Director of Client Relations, Tamara Wayland will nurture client relationships, making sure that Cooper does great design work that meets client needs. At Cooper, Tamara will work directly with clients to identify their underlying business problems and to strategize on how design can help solve those problems. Tamara is looking forward to strengthening Cooper’s client relationships: “I see myself as a partner with our clients. My goal is not just to move the client’s project forward, but to to help the client move their business forward.” Tamara is excited to join Cooper: “Cooper has a great history in interaction design, and does a great job of articulating how design impacts business. I’m especially excited about Cooper’s focus on bringing together design and development.”

Tamara has over 18 years of experience in the interaction design space. Tamara joins Cooper from Adaptive Path, where she served as Director of Client Relations. Prior to Adaptive Path, Tamara worked with several firms in the branding, marketing, and design industries, including frog design, Young & Rubicam, and CKS.

At Cooper, we’re quite fond of pair design as a way to get to the highest quality design quickly. (Even if you have to cheat your way there.) Most of our client engagements involve a pair of interaction designers dedicated to projects full time. Over the years, two specific roles have evolved out of this paired practice.

We struggled to come up with descriptive titles for each of the roles. Though the debate was a tough one, we erred on the side of accuracy at some cost of accessibility, and call the roles generator and synthesizer. (We’re aware that that makes us sound like machines, but with the quality of design teams are able to produce in this way, maybe that’s apt?)

Generator	Synthesizer
The generator is the one whose job is to fearlessly generate design ideas; to walk up to the whiteboard or OneNote page, draw some designs, and say, “OK, here’s how I’m thinking it will work for the persona.” The gen, working with visual design, makes the design solution visual; first with hand drawings, then in illustration software.	The synthesizer is the one whose job is to insightfully keep challenging, improving, and synthesizing the design into a whole. As the “gen” posits ideas, the “synth” will ask questions, help analyze, improve, and iterate it. The synth describes the behavior in words, incorporating the gen’s drawings to create a design specification.
Together they…
…identify and evolve designs, so that the persona using the system we’re designing accomplishes their goals in awesome ways.

Some asides about these distinctions:

1. These roles aren’t cast in stone. Sometimes when the gen is out of ideas, she might hand the pen to the synth so he can draw what he’s thinking, and she’ll “synth” him.
2. We’re experimenting and refining our methods all the time, as with our new integrated product development offering. Not all projects need two interaction designers.
3. Our team structures include additional, invaluable members like visual designers, industrial designers, engagement leads, etc. This article is just about the relationship of paired interaction designers.

This is some heady stuff to explain, whether to our parents, at a cocktail party, or interaction designers applying to work with Cooper. For this reason, we often find ourselves employing metaphors to explain the relationship. Since this is usually when the lightbulb goes off, I thought I would share some of the more effective and engaging ones.