Stratus Air: A Cooper concept project

When we saw the topic of this year's I.D. Magazine Annual Design Review concept category, we thought it would be fun to put together an entry. As frequent travelers, we were particularly inspired by the brief: design a graphic, object, or environment that would improve the experience of air travel.

We thought our approach was a good mix of practicality and inspiration; a premium loyalty service enabled by helpful bits of technology that would ease the pain and smooth the turbulence of business travel. Did we expect to win? Absolutely. Even though the judges didn’t share our enthusiasm, we’re happy with what we came up with, and we wanted to share it with you.

We present Stratus Air.

(To view at full screen HD, click the little icon with 4 diagonal arrows next to the Vimeo logo.)

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After-market device solutions: What are they good for?

Why are after-market casings so popular with consumers especially for portable devices? Are they just about protecting the product? Are existing product designs too boring? Have consumers lost confidence in the quality of product manufacturing? Or, do they just want to customize their devices to be unique and special, as we have seen in Asia's extensive customization culture?

Leather, custom decals and heavy-duty rubber covers.

The iPhone is beautifully designed, engineered, and manufactured. Apple has used high-quality materials to avoid scratches and heavier damage that come along with daily use. There are no painted parts, which would easily scratch to reveal the substrate. The early complaint about the physical construction was that its sleek finish made the phone too slippery. The absence of grip details on the surface, and the aluminum casing of the first generation, made the problem worse. Apart from this flaw, the physical form of the iPhone is well-designed, and I think it has great potential to display the aged patina that comes from long life and high-quality materials. Which makes me wonder: Why cover it up with a cheap plastic cover?

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Video of Kim Goodwin speaking about how to integrate interaction, visual and industrial design at IxDA NYC

Last night, our own Kim Goodwin presented her talk "Designing a Unified Experience" at the IxDA NYC, generously hosted by our friends at LiquidNet.

(Click the button on the bottom right of the "screen" for a fullscreen view.)

About the talk

Interaction design, visual design, and industrial design are distinct disciplines for good reason: Each excels in different ways. Interaction designers must be good at imagining structure and flow, which requires strong analytical skills and a high degree of rigor, especially for complex systems. Visual designers and industrial designers are masters of visual and physical usability but are also masters of emotion: They know how to evoke caution, attract attention, and instill desire for a product at first glance. Users have just one experience of a product, though. All three aspects of the design must work in concert, or the product will fail to satisfy. Integration of the three disciplines is a central theme of Kim’s new book, Designing for the Digital Age.

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Beyond the touch screen

Since Apple's introduction of the iPhone, it seems like everyone is excited at the possibility of implementing a touch screen, and why not? There are a lot of benefits to touch-screen interfaces: Extreme flexibility in visual and interaction design allows products and applications to be tailored for specific needs and audiences to target markets; less reliance on hardware controls means significant savings in mechanical cost; larger screens allow more opportunities for richness in states and animations; greater flexibility also means the possibility to reduce waste in the creation of longer-lasting devices with upgradable OS's and software.

But with the flexibility of touch-screen interfaces come drawbacks. Typing is slower and less accurate than on a physical keyboard, and many functions require more taps than those tied to hardware controls. (Compare the number of taps required to access a single email on a Treo to the same action on an iPhone). There is tremendous opportunity to investigate how physical controls can be used in conjunction with touch screens in terms of on-device positioning, state functionality and force sensitivity behaviors to achieve an optimized balance in the end user experience.

To better understand these opportunities, I did a quick survey of some current and future products with this question in mind: How can hardware controls on portable devices integrate with touch screens to advance the current user experience?

Recent advances

There has been a great deal of progress made to improve usability, extend functionality and introduce more tactile feedback mechanisms to the touch interface experience:

• Gyroscopic sensors for display format orientation and gaming
• Proximity, light, motion sensing
• Texture and material simulations
• 3D simulation
• Multi finger input technology
• Audible and visual feedback for confirmation
• Customizable functional key vibration
• Physically moving displays to simulate a mechanical switch action

Reckoning with limitations

Information density still remains a major challenge in the design of portable touch interfaces. The human hand and fingers just don’t come in smaller sizes, so controls and functions must remain relatively large. At the same time, one wonders if older users even see the small on-screen buttons and icons or read font sizes smaller than 12 point. Is this a feasible platform for them or do they need specially-designed phones?

Nokia 5800 Xpressmusic

Physical navigation tools can help here. We know the stylus from prior PDAs; it was used for navigation, drawing, and text recognition. Not quite a portable device but the sketching pen displays offer a range of physical inputs such as trackpads, softkeys, pen pressure and angle sensitivity.

Nokia has added a stylus-like device, the Plektrum, to its 5800 Xpressmusic phone. (What's next? Finger puppet navigation?) The primary drawback with a stylus is that two hands are necessary to operate the device; in addition, many younger people perceive a stylus to be uncool, according to research that I've performed in the past.

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Beautiful Monsters: Check your assumptions at the door

Every product, service, or business model is defined in large measure by what designers take for granted. These assumptions can be held so deeply as to be invisible to the designers themselves. And yet their acknowledgment, and negotiation, are key to industrial evolution, profit, and harmonious relationships to various ecosystems.

In the early days, for instance, you could assume that those with access to computers were backed by organizations willing to invest the funds necessary to acquire or build the complex infrastructure required by computational behemoths. But with the advent of microprocessors and other such developments, that all changed. Now the intrusion of computers into every corner of our lives is nearly complete, with 11 percent of the people recently polled saying they’d like their email deliver directly into their brains in the ultimate post-media consumer fad.

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The next step for community design

Community design centers are non-profit organizations that provide high quality design to underfunded and underserved areas of a community. They're usually established as extensions of colleges and universities, and they're intended to positively impact the surrounding community though design — usually through the physical build.

Back when I was pursuing my degree at the University of Cincinnati’s college of Design, Art, Architecture and Planning, I worked for one, with the intention of helping to revitalize one of the more depressed parts of Cincinnati. The focus was the design of a farmers market, an initiative that included contributions from Architecture, Planning, Industrial Design, and my own discipline of study, Graphic Design. The end result of our work is a vibrant, exciting environment, and this experience got me thinking about ways in which my current discipline could take part.

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Welcome to Michael Voege, Director of Industrial Design!

Some of the most exciting and challenging products we’ve designed here at Cooper have involved a physical component. We admit it, we’re greedy: we want to do more fun projects like that. So without further ado, we’re excited to announce that Michael Voege has joined Cooper as the Director of Industrial Design. We fundamentally believe that interaction, industrial and visual design must be closely coordinated to create user experiences that delight and engage. Bringing in Michael, with his experience, creativity and crazy design mojo, will help us interweave these disciplines even more tightly as we grow our own in-house industrial design department.

Michael comes to Cooper from frog design, where he was an Associate Creative Director. During his 10+ year career he has worked on consumer products, software user interfaces, automotive interiors, furniture, and medical and industrial equipment, among others. Michael was educated at ArtCenter College of Design in Switzerland, and in Pasadena where he studied Transportation and Industrial Design.

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Let the walls do the talking

Many of the Cooperistas were out traveling today, so I had the opportunity to snoop undisturbed. I thought it would be fun to find out a little more about what goes on in the office and to practice an aspect of our research approach while I was at it.

Observation of the environment in which people work is important to gain a well-rounded understanding of the people we design for. The objects and information that people surround themselves with, the character of their workspaces, and the way in which people interact with each other in those spaces all provide important clues about needs, priorities, preferences, and goals. When we talk in someone's personal workspace, we often intuitively pick up on facets that would not come up in conversation.

I snapped some photos of a few curiosities, and wrote down my initial thoughts about what these artifacts say about their owners. I also recorded the questions I would have asked of them if they were around to answer.

I discovered that there are a variety of computer mice around here. At first glance, it looks like people have chosen their mouse setup based on form, control type, and the feel that they prefer.

Questions:
What do you use your computer for? Did you specifically choose this mouse? Why or why not? What other digital products or peripherals do you own? Tell me about your favorite one, and why you like it. Any that you don’t like? Why?

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