Guest blog post by Zak Brazen, our May Cooper Parlor moderator and Creative Strategist for Brazenworks

Prefabitats for polar bears? A jet pack for pandas? Bionic bunny ears for Bengal tigers? It's amazing how much ingenuity 55 people can exhibit in two short hours. But that's just what can happen when you facilitate a motley crew (wink) of design professionals, biologists, and technologists toward a common goal. Entitled, WTF, Evolution? Designing Unnatural Selection, the Cooper Parlor on May 23rd explored the science and fantasy of creating gadgets for animals to 'leap frog' the 6th wave of extinction. As Karolina, one of our attendees put it, "Still buzzing after today's Parlor & lively presentation. Pandas need design advocates too!"

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Designing for Unnatural Selection at the next Cooper Parlor

The 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 Salon: WTF, Evolution? Designing for Unnatural Selection

Moderator: Zak Brazen, Creative Strategist, Brazenworks
Cost: $10
When: Thursday, May 23rd from 6:30-8:30 (doors open at 6)
Where: Cooper Offices, 85 2nd St, 8th Floor, San Francisco, CA
Get your tickets here.

Like it or not, the sixth wave of extinction is upon us. By the end of the century nearly 50% of all species on the planet will be gone. Most will perish simply because they do not have enough time to adapt to rapidly changing environmental conditions. But what if there were gadgets (or services) that would help plants and animals transcend time and make the evolutionary leap? What if there was a Whole Earth Catalog for the non- human among us (eat your heart out, Stewart Brand)?

In this seriously tongue-in-cheek Parlor, Creative Strategist Zak Brazen, of Brazenworks Design and Ingenuity Lab, will explore design opportunities for the near future, when plants and animals are your clients. Parlor participants will imagine, prototype and design tools, gadgets and services that give plants and animals the resources they need to cope with climate change in real time.

Disruptive? To say the least.

Save your spot now, before these seats become extinct.

Related Reading

• Curious what the Parlor is like? Check out this video of  "What Good is a Screen?" A workshop and talk about designing no UI solutions with Don Norman and Golden Krishna.
• Stay in touch about future Parlors, sign up here.

Whew. That was close. As every year, there’s a risk that we’ll be overrun with with zombies, werewolves, vampires, sasquatch(es), and mummies before the veil that separates the world seals tight for another year. But a quick tally around the Cooper offices shows that here, at least, we all made it. Hope all our readers are yet un-undead as well. While we’re taking this breather, we’re called to reflect a bit on this year’s interaction design for monsters.

Monsters are extreme personas

One of the power of personas is that they encourage designers to be more extrospective, to stop designing for themselves. Monsters as personas push this to an extreme. It’s rare that you’ll ever be designing technology for humans who can’t perceive anything, can’t speak any modern language, live nearly eternally, shape shift, etc. But each of these outrageous constraints challenges designers to create a design that could accommodate it, and often ends up driving what’s new or special about the design.

But then again...

Some of the constraints of the monsters are human constraints writ large (or writ strangely).

• Juan wasn’t a useful person in and of himself, but his users exercised flash mob requirements of real-time activation and coordination. Are there flash mob lessons to learn?
• Emily was fighting a zombie infection, but real-world humans are fighting infections all the time. Is there something we can use for medical interfaces?
• Metanipsah has no modern language and a mechanical mental model, but most of us have mobile wayfinding needs at one time or another.
• The Vampire Capitalists behind Genotone took the long view, reminding us of burgeoning post-growth business models.

So maybe they’re great personas after all, guiding us to great design because they’re extreme, just like the canonical OXO Good Grips story, where designing for people with arthritis led the design teams to create products with universal appeal.

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Poor Alexi Devers: Bitten by a "dog," then finding himself naked in a park on the morning after the next full moon, a pulpy mess of unidentifiable victim, dewey and glistening on the ground around him. News stories that day confirm that a terrible murder has taken place by a rabid "dog," and Alexi looks up from the paper with the wide-eyed stare of the recently diagnosed. What will he tell Debbi, his girlfriend? How will he keep her safe? Fortunately for him, after a Google search and a few false leads, he discovers WereSafe, a service for people with "dog" problems just like him. It's expensive, sure, but what choice has he got? One web form and credit card number later, he's joined the service and a special package is on the way.

The WereSafe service has two main service aspects. One to keep the monster contained, and the other to hide the problem from the innocent.

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As Halloween approaches, and the veil between worlds grows wan, threadbare, and permeable, Cooper turns its collective attention to the spirit, spook, and creature population. Last year we sought to understand them from a Goal-Directed perspective. This year we take the next unholy step and design software, devices, and services around these personas. Today we return to Vladmir and Anton, our conflicted vampires.

Antone grew up in southern Louisiana in the late 1700s, the son of a wealthy landowner. After his childhood sweetheart died, he gave up all hope for life. He told his troubles to a young gentleman who came through town, who promised him an end to Antone’s misery. Instead, he was turned to a vampire, and forced to live a life of eternal suffering, unable to visit his family ever again. Today he broods away his evenings in his family’s decaying plantation.

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As Halloween approaches, and the veil between worlds grows wan, threadbare, and permeable, Cooper turns its collective attention to the spirit, spook, and creature population. Last year we sought to understand them from a Goal-Directed perspective. This year we take the next unholy step and design software, devices, and services around these personas. Today we revisit Emily.

Emily is in trouble. She narrowly escaped a horde of flesh eating zombies, but was bitten in the process. Now she's suffering under the gradual onset of zombification—cognitive decline, neurodegeneration, loss of motor control, and an increased apetite for delicious, raw, human flesh. She wants to stave off zombiism as long as she can, but she knows that once she's crossed a threshold, she will succumb and attempt to kill her friends and eat her family. What can she do? Enter iZombie?, an app made specifically for zombie-virus-infected humans, distributed by the military for free to all civilians at the first sign of the inevitable plague.

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As Halloween approaches, and the veil between worlds grows wan, threadbare, and permeable, Cooper turns its collective attention to the spirit, spook, and creature population. Last year we sought to understand them from a Goal-Directed perspective. This year we take the next unholy step and design software, devices, and services around these personas. Today we return to Metanipsah, Vengeful Mummy.

Ordinarily, we’d have qualms about helping someone with such a violent agenda. But his heart scarab was stolen by grave robbers (OK, fine, “archaeologists,” whatever) so really, they’ve got what’s coming to them.

Metanipsah is our oldest persona. His mental model can’t account for technology beyond simple machines, and is built around a paradigm of myth and magic. Fortunately, there are a lot of cutting-edge technology options that might be indistinguishable to him from myth, according to Mummyologist Chris Noessel. With that in mind, we're pleased to share the Vengeance Buddy.

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height="32" />

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JuanSpotters "margin-left:270px; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-weight:bold; color: #969696;">
View More By This Developer
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By Chris Noessel & Glen Davis

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height="23" title="This...this isn't real." />

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$1.69
Category: Lifestyle
Updated: Oct 19, 2012
Version: 2.3.2
Size: 6.1 MB
Languages: English, Stygian, Qwghlmian
Seller: Cooper
© 2012 Cooper
Rated 4+

"font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-weight: normal; line-height: 16px; color:#969696">
Requirements: Psychic sensitivity, resistance to fear-based
paralysis, iPhone 4 & 5

"font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-weight: bold; color:#474747; margin-bottom: 5px;">
Description
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"http://www.cooper.com/journal/2011/10/juan_espinoza_class_5_full-roa.html">Real
life ghost Juan Espinoza roams the lonely train tracks of Bexar county on
full-moon nights, searching for his lost head. Track him and get a chance at
seeing Juan in the (un)flesh with the official JuanSpotters app!
We’re talking a real Class 5 Full-Roaming Vapor. The
app is fully-featured.

• "font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-weight: normal; line-height: 16px; color:#969696">
  Be the first to capture a pic of Juan to earn points!
• "font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-weight: normal; line-height: 16px; color:#969696">
  If he’s spotted by someone else, just-in-time directions
  get you to where you can see him for reals!
• "font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-weight: normal; line-height: 16px; color:#969696">
  Once Juan is spotted, you'll get alerts to tell you when you’re on deck for spotting, and a map on how to get there. A
  timer lets you know when your spotting turn is up and automatically tags in the next Spotter.
• "font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-weight: normal; line-height: 16px; color:#969696">
  Want Juan at a bachelorette party? A haunted-house? Halftime? An
  enemy’s corporate headquarters?
  JuanSpotters can lead him right there for an affordable fee.

"font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-weight: normal; line-height: 16px; color:#969696">Cooper
Web Site "http://www.cooper.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/tinytriangle.png" width="4" height="7" /> "margin-left:30px;">JuanSpotters Support "vertical-align: 1px; margin-left:3px;" src="http://www.cooper.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/tinytriangle.png" width="4"
height="7" />

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What’s New in Version 1.4
"font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-weight: normal; line-height: 16px; color:#969696">
In this update, we added support for iOS6 and the new iPhone Ecto!

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iPhone Screenshots

height="482" style="float:left; margin-right: 30px;" /> width="270" height="482" style="float:left; margin-right: 30px;" /> "http://www.cooper.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/JS-02.png" width="270" height="482" style=
"float:left; margin-right: 30px;" />

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As Halloween approaches, and the veil between worlds grows wan, threadbare, and permeable, Cooper turns its collective attention to the spirit, spook, and creature population. Last year we sought to understand them from a Goal-Directed perspective. This year we take the next unholy step and design software, devices, and services around these personas. Today we return to Romulus, North American Woodland Ape.

To serve this hairy fellow, we're proud to unveil a new matchmaking service, nailed to the tree by Cooper designers Greg and Glen: The Mate-Night Club.

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It was one of those, “please, please, let this send,” kind of moments when you hope a weak airport WiFi connection doesn’t disconnect, a low-battery indicator doesn’t shut down your laptop — who knows where there’s an outlet in this airport — and your email actually sends to your million dollar client when the message popped up and your stomach drops: “Oops!”

Like some kind of creepy, American Psycho moment, a hardly-discernible, non-apologetic message from Gmail put this exact dagger into my heart and sent me wondering what went wrong.

Sure, of course, just lemme look up error #001. What?

Google’s Chrome browser gives off an even worse error message that doesn’t make things better, just a wanna-be-hipster-piece-of-software knocking off a Susan Kare classic laughing in your face when you’re frustrated:

Maybe this is part of some awful brand initiative. After all, Google is a place of smiles. An every-color-of-the-rainbow logo, and three square meals place to work with unbelievable benefits. But, then again, Google is hardly alone in this kind of “smile when you’ve fallen” approach to error messages.

Microsoft is sadly considering implementing the same, cutesy thinking in a revamp of their blue screen of death as a part of their otherwise exciting, new Windows 8 operating system:

(windows.staenz.com)

Oh, great. My 14 year-old cousin is writing error messages in Redmond.

Fortunately, Microsoft offers some advice. Just search for the error message, “HAL_INITIALIZATION_FAILED”…oh wait, this is the blue screen of death. My computer is totally effed.

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