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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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.

Join Cooper and Fair Trade USA for the first Cooper Parlor and UX Boot Camp of 2013!

Cooper Parlor is a gathering of designers and design-minded people to exchange ideas around a specific topic. We aim to cultivate conversation that instigates, surprises, entertains, and most importantly, broadens our community's collective knowledge and perspective about the potential for design.

Upcoming Parlor: Model Business - Turning Values into Value

Moderator: Patrick Keenan, Interaction Designer, Cooper

When: Thursday, February 21st

Time: 6:30-8:30 (doors open at 6)

Cost: $15

Where: Fair Trade USA,
1500 Broadway #400, Oakland, CA

Save your space now.

Why does it make sense to pay more for coffee even if it tastes the same? How could it be successful to give away two pairs of shoes every time you sell one? What about the color red makes an iPod more expensive? It's the business model, stupid. A business model is a design, not unlike a wireframe, but instead of describing an interaction in the world, it describes how a company creates and captures value in the marketplace. A well designed business model has the power to align personal values with routine purchases. But what are the patterns? And when is one business model more appropriate than another?

This Cooper Parlor will explore existing business models designed to help consumers put their money where their heart is. We’ll begin by looking at a couple of specific cases where values (moral principles) were turned into value (additional profit). Then, we'll dive into how you can incorporate this framework into your design practice.

Why this topic?

The nonprofit partner for our March UX Boot Camp: Fair Trade USA inspired this conversation. We were intrigued by the certification system that Fair Trade USA uses to help consumers to connect with a deeper mission and put their money where their morals are. This got us thinking about other businesses and business models that put their values first. Coupled with Patrick’s insight into business models and how to map them, we thought this would be a perfect opportunity for exploration.

Want to Get Deeper into this Problem Space?

The parlor is an introduction to the larger exploration that we'll have at the UX Boot Camp: Fair Trade USA this March. Together designers, developers, and project managers will 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. This is a real opportunity to impact the future of Fair Trade USA, while beefing up your portfolio and making new connections.

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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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Seeing some old friends at Ixd13!

Here are some of the programs Cooperistas attended on Monday at Interaction13.

Follow all of Interaction13 through daily recaps on the Cooper Journal. Here's Day 2,
Day 3,
Day 4.

Smart & Beautiful: Designing Robots & Intelligent Machines

By Dr. Matthew Powers (Carnegie Mellon University)

We make robots that mimic human bodies to do the 3D jobs (dirty, dull, and dangerous – ex. strip mining), but there is so much more potential in intelligent machines than just this. As designers, we need to take a step back and think about the design implications of robots and intelligent machines working in our world.

We already have robots in our houses.

Nest learning thermostat is a robot. This product is a perfect example of cooperation between robotics and designers. it is intelligent and well designed so the user isn't obligated to manually input data.

Call for action for Designers:

We need to move from solving robotics problems to solving problems with robotics.
Robotics provides tools. Design grounds robotics into practical problem and brings a more human approach to a field that is by definition inhuman

At the end of the talk, Dr. Powers threw out this doozy:

Will it be the role of designers, engineers, and/or policy-makers to decide the “ethics” of robots? Who decides how an automated car would make the choice between hitting a bus full of children or a pedestrian?

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It was a full house of design thinkers with a Silicon Valley twist. Serial Entrepreneurs. Voice-activation specialists. Tech wunderkinds. An evening of passionate discussion about the future of interfaces.

“I felt like I was back in college — the good parts of college,” Strava designer Peter Duyan told me afterwards.

Peter was crammed in this room of college-like discourse — designed for 35, now seating over 60 — because of a blog post I wrote that went unexpectedly viral.

I had proposed that “the best interface is no interface.” That we should focus on experiences and problems, not on screens. That UX is not UI. Two days after it was published, it was shared more on Twitter than anything ever written on The Cooper Journal, Core77 or Designer Observer. A week later, a Breaking Development podcast. Two weeks, a popular Branch discussion. A month, top ten on Hacker News again. All surprising, flattering, amazing. And that evening, a conversation.

In the spirit of discourse, special guest and design legend Don Norman started the evening with an entertaining retort: “They made a big mistake when they invited me.” (Watch it above, or listen to it here. And if you haven’t read his books, you should).

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Guest post by Gabriel Aldaz, PhD candidate, Stanford

My daily life as a PhD student at Stanford university is filled with classes, attending conferences, writing grants, email, email, and more email, and the occasional hanging out (or, more likely, trying to raise a few million in seed funding for a startup). My peers and I have found that in that in the chaos that is the school year, we easily forget an important group of people we should be interacting more with: each other.

I belong to a research group called DesignX, part of Stanford’s Center for Design Research. Most of the students have technical backgrounds with a focus on design methodology and user-centered innovation. With the end of the school year approaching, I wanted to organize an introspective workshop to evaluate how we worked together as a group over the past nine months, and how we could strengthen our culture in the coming year. It was a huge boon to have Teresa Brazen and Stefan Klocek at Cooper to organize a two-hour year-end culture assessment workshop.

A week before the workshop, Cooper asked the DesignX members to complete a brief survey about our perceptions about our group’s values, vision, interpersonal relationships, practices, and physical work environment. Armed with our survey responses, Teresa and Stefan began the workshop by presenting emerging themes about how we viewed our culture within the DesignX program. They highlighted tension between self-directed work and collaboration, structure versus chaos, and focus on research versus interaction with start-ups. Following Cooper methodology, we then broke up into pairs to brainstorm practices, methods, and enhancements to the physical environment that would improve the student experience next year. Lastly, we drilled down into individual ideas with the goal of developing a list of inspiring and actionable ideas. The workshop was an eye-opening experience for many of us.

One insight was that our visiting scholars had not previously met all of our group members, despite having worked in the same building for three months. As a group, we also realized that we were not up-to-date on each others’ research. We were using each other to solve small problems, such as how to obtain a particular piece of equipment or find test subjects, but were not helping each other with more daunting tasks such as writing grants, publishing papers, or solving technical issues. Based on these insights, we generated a number of good initiatives, some of which could be implemented in a matter of hours and could have a significant and immediate impact. Examples included a social event at the start of each quarter, a yearly retreat, and making information more accessible and visible (on paper or in electronic format). Lastly, many participants expressed relief that others shared the thoughts they had about the DesignX culture, and that the workshop had brought these into the open.

One of the benefits of having a design and strategy consulting firm like Cooper run the workshop is objectivity. I would especially like to thank Teresa and Stefan not only for their time and expertise, but also for setting a positive tone from the start. Throughout the workshop, the atmosphere was very open and cooperative. I hope that our culture assessment workshop will act as a catalyst to improve the group dynamics and ultimately the quality of our research in the coming school year.

See more photos of the experience here.

A Note from Cooper:

If the DesignX workshop sounds like something that you or your team could benefit from, contact us about doing a customized culture assessment workshop for your organization.

Cooper built this workshop on collaboration methods and techniques we describe in more detail in our Design Communication & Collaboration class. This course teaches an integrated approach to design that addresses the needs and perspectives of team members in every discipline throughout the process. It reveals methods for helping siloed teams work together and communicate more effectively, tools for creating buy-in, and how individuals and teams can build credibility within organization. It will teach you how to create an environment and practices that support a thriving, creative team.

Our next Design Communication & Collaboration Course:

July 26-27

San Francisco, California

Register

If you want to build great software, you can go it alone. You can design and build your product, make infrastructure decisions, manage releases, get the word out. Yet soon enough, if things are going well, you'll start to get traction, you'll want to scale, and your solo run will be over: You're going to need to work with others. You're going to need to create a team.

You'll find books and blog posts that will tell you how to create and manage a team, and they will include all sorts of helpful generalities. But I'll suggest a simpler framework for keeping the right things in mind: Think about your product team like a baseball team.

Nick Myers (Cooper) and David Bairstow (Thomson Reuters) are moderating a discussion on this subject at South by Southwest! Details here: Building Team Chemistry in Baseball & Technology.

Why baseball? Because both business and baseball are highly competitive, and baseball provides simple, clear object lessons for just about anything that you might confront in assembling a team -- how to spend money, how to evaluate talent, how to measure success. It's filled with vivid illustrations about teams that vastly underperform, teams that outperform, teams with rigid philosophies, teams that are fluid and flexible in their function. Most of all, baseball lays bare the fact that it is damnably difficult to create a highly functioning team. It's really easy to assemble a bunch of individuals who don't give a shit about anything but their own achievements; it's a lot harder to assemble people who are willing to learn, willing to work with others, and willing to do whatever it takes to win. A highly functioning team is not only about talent, not only about payroll, not only about organizational support, not only about leadership ... And yet it includes each of these things.

Find the right players

In baseball and technology, success starts starts with assembling good people. There's no way around this. If you don't have the right people, you're not going to compete. Ask the Kansas City Royals. They haven't had a perennial All-Star player since the 1990s, and they've only had one winning season since the mid-80s. (Disclosure: I am from Kansas City).

The challenge is not only to find great people, but to define who the right players are for your team. As longtime Baltimore Orioles manager Earl Weaver put it, "A manager's job is simple. Just pick the 25 best players for what he wants done" (emphasis mine). For Weaver, finding the right players meant finding players who could play a variety of positions in the field, which allowed him to employ a more situational, opportunistic style of baseball. It's not the only style of baseball, but Weaver worked it on the way to a World Series championship with a decade's worth of very competitive teams.

Fear conventional wisdom

If you're looking for someone to take the lead on a product, it's only natural to see the words "Product Lead, Apple" in a LinkedIn resume and say to yourself, "Let's give this one a call." Baseball executives used to do this kind of stuff all the time. They identified a conventional need -- "we need a big bat" or "we need a left-handed starter" -- and they go after a guy with that particular trait or great numbers.

Today's baseball executives evaluate players and positions with much more sophistication. They look for players who perform well in situations and environments that match their needs. If you're looking for a lead designer who can work across multiple product managers and scrum teams, you're going to need someone who can consult, cajole, and sell as well as they can design. The point is: Don't go after a big bat if what you really need is someone who gets on base. Get real about what's going to be needed to be successful in the role, and beware conventions and role names.

If you saw the movie Moneyball, you saw that the Oakland A's experimented with new methods of evaluating talent and performance. In the film, the team's scouts were portrayed as a group of grumpy old dudes who evaluated prospects with their guts, while the young guys in the corner uses "sabermetrics," baseball-ese for advanced statistics.

If you've ever tried to hire someone, you know how tempting it can be to use your gut: "Hey, she went to Stanford, so that must mean ..." Unfortunately, this method is doomed to failure, no offense to Stanford. Even more unfortunately, there's no sabermetric version of a person's career performance on LinkedIn. But the real lesson here is that the A's took the lingua franca of baseball performance -- player stats -- and applied it in a very different way to cut through the noise. So: What is the lingua franca of your category? What can you do to get beyond the traditional ways of evaluating talent?

Stay in your lane

Ever hired a dev manager who thinks he knows your business better than you do? Or a design director who can't stay out of the details? ... It's easy hire great people who don't know the boundaries of their greatness. Baseball is littered with cautionary tales of high-performing (and expensive) individuals who detract from the team because they're in the wrong lane, playing the wrong role. Conversely, the best baseball teams are characterized by players who know exactly what their role is, and who are employed by their managers in the right way.

Of course, people are often rewarded for ignoring the boundaries of his or her lanes. Steve Jobs never met a boundary he didn't ignore, which was part of what attracted great people to him. But how many Steve Jobses come around in a generation? You want team members with ambition and drive, but if you end up with people who are more driven by individual success or gratification than by the success of the team, you're going to have a harder time succeeding. Seek folks who want to be part of creating the Apple organization of your industry, rather than people who want to be the next Steve Jobs.

Identify your World Series

In baseball, the ultimate goal is clear: Win the World Series. Everyone knows this -- fans, players, coaches -- and it provides a very simple benchmark for evaluating overall performance. Your World Series should be a big goal, not simply increasing revenue 10% or landing a big account. It's a monumental achievement: an IPO; the millionth download of your app; becoming the market leader in your category.

It's okay if your World Series is unattainable today. In baseball and in technology, there are teams with no realistic shot at a World Series this year, or next. The task for teams like this is to establish a path to that ultimate prize. Most teams should be asking themselves: What's the first milestone on our way to the World Series? You need to win your division first.

Get lucky

Let's face it, there's no champion in the history of any sport that hasn't benefited from some moment of luck. The 2010 San Francisco Giants were on the verge of losing a critical game in the playoffs when the opposing second baseman experienced an utter meltdown in the field, making three catastrophic mistakes that allowed the Giants to escape with a win and go on to the World Series. Diehard Giants fans will recall the 2003 playoffs, when a critical error swung momentum toward the Florida Marlins, who ended up winning that game, and then went on to win the World Series.

So you could say that it all works out, but that's probably one of the areas in which technology and baseball are very different. If you're waiting around for your luck to change in product development, you won't be around for long.

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Where do you start when you're approaching a complex software design problem? If you work on a large development team, you know that software engineers and UX designers will often approach the same design problem from radically different perspectives. The term "software design" itself can mean very different things to software architects, system programmers, and user experience designers. Software engineers typically focus on the architectural patterns and programmatic algorithms required to get the system working, while UX designers often start from the goals and needs of the users.

In the spring of 2009, I participated in a research study that looked at the ways in which professional software designers approach complex design problems. The research study, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, was led by researchers from the Department of Infomatics at the University of California, Irvine. The researchers traveled to multiple software companies, trying to better understand how professional software designers collaborate on complex problems. At each company, they asked to observe two software designers in a design session. At my company, AmberPoint, where I worked at the time as an interaction designer, I was paired with my colleague Ania Dilmaghani, the programming lead of the UI development team. In a conference room with a whiteboard, the researchers set up a video camera, and handed us a design prompt describing the requirements for a traffic control simulation system for undergraduate civil engineering students. We were allotted two hours to design both the user interaction and the code structure for the system.

Jim Dibble and Ania Dilmaghani at the whiteboard in their research design session

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In our modern digital environment, all businesses have a great competitive need for creative thinking that far exceeds our industrial forebears. In the quest for an institutional source of creativity, the brainstorming session, where several people meet to have fresh ideas, has emerged as the front runner. Brainstorming can be fun, and some prominent consulting firms have prospered proselytizing this technique, but it has a remarkably thin track record of success.

While people think and behave differently when they are in large groups versus when they are alone, I also believe that people behave still differently when they are in the presence of only one other person. This is often overlooked, yet I believe that creative people can be at their most effective when they work in pairs.

I believe that all people share these three modes of behavior: solo, paired, and group. Generally, these differences are noted only as interesting social quirks, and have not been investigated by academia or exploited by business, but their differences have important implications for the creative manager.

Brainstorming's adherents believe that a group of people can together imagine more and better solutions than any one person can alone. I won't dispute that assertion, but just because one is better than the other doesn't imply that either is anywhere close to being optimal.

A recent article in the New York Times put forth the radical idea that brainstorming might not be such a good idea, and cites recent research indicating that working solo is more productive than working in groups. The author, Susan Cain, points out that many of our greatest innovations came not from large groups of ideating peers, but from solo geniuses working in isolation. Her case in point is Steve Wozniak, the enigmatic inventor of the Apple computer.

As a former inventor who worked almost exclusively by myself, I agree with Cain. The problem is that, at the time, I would only work for myself, and like me, few independent creative people can be motivated to solve the problems of someone else's business. Unless you get remarkably lucky, you need to find a way to reliably innovate with people content to have a steady job.

When I began to consult for others, I too faced the challenge of generating consistent, reliable, and predictable imaginative problem solving. After some struggle, the correct solution finally emerged: pair designing.

This year marks Cooper's twentieth anniversary engaged in intensively creative work performed for hire, on schedule, on budget, for a wildly diverse clientele. Our work is nothing if not creative, and we consistently astonish our clients with the depth of our innovative thinking. What's more, we almost never do group brainstorming, and solo problem solving is, while not forbidden here, institutionally frowned upon as being too slow and expensive. Our ability to innovate reliably and effectively is largely due to our insistence that our creative consultants work in pairs.

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