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. In this particular UX Boot Camp, students will work with American Public Media's Marketplace Money to transform the experience of radio. They'll come up with new tools and models for engagement that encourage multi-platform participation, crowd-sourced content, and an entirely new type of relationship between listeners and show host.

Sound like a challenge you want to solve? Save your spot now.
Read More

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.

Read More

Last week, a handful of Cooperistas attended the Interaction 13 conference and wrote daily recaps of what they heard for our blog readers (Catch up with a quick read about day 1, day 2, day 3, and day 4). The Education Summit, a full day workshop that explored the global problem space of interaction design education, merited the lengthier share-out below.

The Interaction 13 conference in Toronto was a five-day whirlwind of speakers, workshops and networking. Threaded through all this information was a tasty glimpse into the future: a world where technologies play nicely with one another, don’t demand our undivided attention, and are great at helping people do what they do best: be people. My sense (and hope) is that this utopian vision just might be possible (rather than the “Terminator-style” future Angel Anderson warned us of in the Great UX Debate. Scary! Let’s not do that, pretty please.).

While visions are great for building hope, the education of emerging designers is a key factor in helping us get us to that future. In an effort to learn more about the issues facing educators (that could potentially sabotage utopia), I attended the Interaction Design Education Summit. Here is a snapshot of the conversations and ideas that emerged:

How did you become an interaction designer?

Most of the attendees’ responses to this question fell under one (or more) of these themes:

• Serendipity
• Iterative wandering
• I built my own journey (through books and mentors)

Takeaway: There are many paths, they aren’t always structured or intentional, and we need to take this into account in our approach to education.

Read More

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?

Read More

In classes and cocktail hours, lots of people ask me either how they can switch careers into interaction design, or how they can improve their self-trained “IxD” chops.

Of course Cooper offers a number of awesome training courses to help folks do just that (but we can’t be everywhere in the world at once) and there are great university courses here in San Francisco Bay Area and around the world (but not everyone can take that kind of time off).

So if you’re a self-starter, unable to attend a training session and can’t take time off for school, or want to be able to speak the language of interaction design, what can you do? How can you make those first steps to getting more familiar with the field?

I recommend reading up on some of the fundamentals, join up with practitioners online, and actually start designing. More on each follows.

Read up on the fundamentals

Get your hands on copies of the following three books and give them a good read. Not a flip through, and not a skim. These are the basic things you need to know. Please note that I'm aware of the conflict of interest of a Practice Lead at Cooper saying that two of three fundamental books are ones published by Cooper, but even after much handwringing and gnashing of teeth over the seeming conflict of interests, these are still my recommendations. They would be if I didn't work here.

The Inmates Are Running the Asylum
by our own Alan Cooper

"Inmates" details the reasons why designers should lead the charge of software design, and why personas are the primary tool we use to do it.

The Design of Everyday Things
by Donald Norman

Norman plainly lays out the fundamentals of design thinking from cognitive psychology, industrial design, and interaction design standpoints.

About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design
by Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann, & David Cronin

AF3 contains best practices for the medium of the human-computer interface.

(If you happen to be a sci-fi fan, I’ll certainly also recommend my own book and blog as a way of applying design thinking to interfaces that appear in that perennially-favorite genre, but it’s hardly considered a fundamental.)

Read More

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.

Read More

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

Read More

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.

Read More

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.

Read More