Cooper Journal: Innovation

Beautiful Monsters: Check your assumptions at the door

by David Fore on August 14, 2008 | Comments

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.

Brainstorm without snapping branches

by Dana Smith on August 13, 2008 | Comments

Ah, the rumble of an impending brainstorm. In some organizations, it is a prized tool that puts a sparkle in the eye and wind in the sails. In others, it's a feared term and a necessary evil.

And what exactly is a brainstorm anyway? Many disciplines, whether design, business, technology, or otherwise, have their own brainstorming voodoo, though it can seem like this vision is transported via secret handshakes and smoke signals. Everyone knows something is going on, but no one really articulates what. After all, it's really just the time when we get together and come up with stuff (hopefully of the clever variety), right?

I've found myself brainstorming to many tunes over the years, from industrial design rock-fests to a modern interaction design synthpop, a visual design rumba to a change management cha-cha. And this often little-understood microcosm of society has an uncanny way of pushing buttons and exposing long-held beliefs right when they're on the way to the chopping block. It's the place where the skeletons come out, and can remain fraught with quicksand no matter how long you've been doing it.

So why bother? Sure, they can be challenging. But they are also where the magic happens. Where the mish-mash of life experiences come together to create something from nothing. And the principles that make this magic happen don't change.

This is what I've learned along the way...

Be present — Put it away.

A single person checking their email or starring out the window can have a ripple effect on the whole room. This is your time! The time for the great idea. Be there for it.

Be the dynamic — Say it, show it, repeat.

Make explicit the desired group dynamic alongside the goals for the session outcome. Discuss the goals with the room, get agreement, and then keep those goals in sight. While focusing on a new idea, people can easily forget themselves and relax into old (sometimes less constructive) habits; it's only human. So stick up those dynamic and outcome goals (to your forehead if you have to) as an ever-present target.

Be a good citizen — Build a community with your bricks.

A highly-functioning brainstorm participant is both an individual contributor and advocate for the group at the same time. Each of their ideas serves a dual purpose - to contribute to the output of the session, as well as to act as a springboard for someone else's next idea. Do both with intention.

Be positive — See the good, and say so (and don't throw those bricks.)

See the good in your own ideas, and articulate the positive in the ideas of others. This is how the momentum gets started, and how to keep it going. Make "Yes, and also..." your favorite phrase.

Be safe — Keep the wolf at bay.

Ask clarifying questions if you need to, but keep those ideas away from judgment or analysis; Try setting aside a separate time for processing later. One wacky idea is all it takes to ignite the twinkle of the idea in someone's eye. Analysis and judgment are the big-idea-stealers in disguise, and guarantee discord will break the momentum before you ever get to the REALLY BIG idea.

Be flexible — Keep the energy up.

Once you have the momentum going, be flexible and go with the flow. And don't forget to pause for the occasional office Nerf gun battle if you're stuck. (You do have an office Nerf gun, don't you?) Sometimes there's nothing better to shake loose those brain cells or energize the room than a little silliness and a good laugh.

So what's the result of all this? You're ready to...

Be highly generative — Have more and better ideas, and have them fast!

Brainstorming is as much about intuition and free-association as it is about brainpower or knowledge. Speed and quantity help break through the 'low-hanging fruit' ideas, and get the brain-juice flowing. The result? You push through to new combinations and insights that will surprise and enlighten you, pointing the way. You'll get to better places than you ever thought you'd go, and I bet you'll win the day.

So what brainstorming voodoo have you picked up along the way? What works for you? What doesn't?

Startle wayfinding

by Chris Noessel on August 11, 2008 | Comments

Axel Peemoeller’s wayfinding system for the Melbourne Eureka Tower Carpark has been making the internet rounds. Props to him, it’s a novel and eyecatching design. (See below for one example from his site.) But something about it makes me think it’s disorienting (and possibly dangerous) for drivers. Let me try and articulate my amateur cognitive science/interaction design theory to explain.

While driving, your brain’s 3D systems are in high gear. (Pardon the pun.) Your mind is tuned to look for positioning cues such as occlusion, parallax, and especially size changes. This last is most important, as your visual system is on the lookout for anything that suddenly grows larger than the things around it, which would be a clear sign that you’re about to hit something. It’s called the startle response, and it happens within about 80 milliseconds, far too fast for any rational processing to counteract it.

So now, think of yourself in the Eureka Tower Carpark. Turning a corner, you’re a little confounded by the strange and lovely colored shapes on the wall. What’s going on here? All of a sudden, your visual system puts all these shapes together in a way that could only make sense if there was something (in this case, typography) jumping out right in front of you. Your gut reaction should be to slam on the brakes, even if your logical brain can decipher the thing a few milliseconds later. Hopefully the driver behind you left enough room.

So I haven’t been there, and I don’t know if this conjecture bears out in fact, but the pictures certainly set off my startle reaction.

Beautiful Monsters: Be the change

by David Fore on July 29, 2008 | Comments

The Market Street grid, Courtesy: bricoleurbanism.

This week, San Francisco started choosing sides for another Market Street Mêlée, which we fight once every ten years or so. On one side of the double-yellow line are arrayed various assorted starry-eyed, bipedal dreamers who propose closing down the main artery of our fair city to most carbon-emitting traffic so as to give pedestrians and bicyclists a break, reduce pollution, and increase the beauty and overall mellow vibe of the grid. On the other side stand the self-styled hard-nosed rationalists who see in this as a pedal-powered economic and moral calamity in the making.

Beautiful Monsters: The odds are in

by David Fore on July 22, 2008 | Comments

Beautiful Monsters is a series by David Fore, head of Cooper's consulting practice. It is intended encourage conversation about how interaction designers can grow more sustainable practices, with the goals of improving our fortunes, our relationships, and the health of our planet. Start at the beginning, or read the latest installment below.

Critics may charge that I’m loving on WunderMap too much. But these guys have vision. They provide fantastic resources for visualizing many of the changes afoot, which is a necessary precursor to visualizing solutions. But what they haven’t done yet is provide us the coordinates of our honeybees, one in three of which have disappeared from these parts. Without honeybees we don’t have agriculture as we know it — and, ipso facto, culture.

"How would our federal government respond if 1 out of every 3 cows was dying?" a scientist recently asked a bovine Congress.

Beautiful Monsters: Why on earth does this matter?

by David Fore on July 15, 2008 | Comments

It used to be that everybody talked about the weather, but nobody did anything about it. Not anymore. Through the magic of technology, I am empowered to make better decisions about where not to breathe. That’s because the good people at WunderMap have devised a smoke map. For a few days there, the smoke from local wildfires were absorbed by our (formerly) infinitely capacious atmosphere. So I didn’t think I’d need the smoke map. But then temperatures hit new epochal records, humidity took a dive, and the wind began fanning the flames again.

Should our misfortunes expand to include plagues of frogs, boils, and gnats, I know WunderMap will have my back.

In other news last week, the U.S. continued to emit vivid plumes of interactive graphics displaying our industrial might, which nobody can deny … it’s just that my emissions are necessary, while yours are not. World leaders at the G8 Summit in Japan, meanwhile, decided to postpone serious action on climate change for another few decades. Tomorrow’s always the best day to begin a diet.

Why on earth should such things matter to interaction designers? Put another way, why does earth matter to interaction designers?

Beautiful Monsters: With such a late start, we best get moving

by David Fore on July 2, 2008 | Comments

From our position at the confluence of human desire, technology, and business, interaction designers can make a tremendously positive—or negative—impact on the biggest issues facing us today: the sustainability of commerce, human societies, and natural systems. Despite these opportunities, software makers are discouraged from thinking outside the aspect ratio of the computer ’s monitor.

This is the first in a series of articles intended to serve as an ongoing conversation about how interaction designers can move the industry toward an Ecosystem Centered Design to improve our fortunes, our relationships, and the health of our planet.

About Face 3: Foreword

by Alan Cooper on May 7, 2007 | Comments

The industrial age is over. Manufacturing, the primary economic driver of the past 175 years, no longer dominates. While manufacturing is bigger than ever, it has lost its leadership to digital technology, and software now dominates our economy. We have moved from atoms to bits. We are now in the postindustrial age.

More and more products have software in them. My stove has a microchip in it to manage the lights, fan, and oven temperature. When the deliveryman has me sign for a package, it's on a computer, not a pad of paper. When I shop for a car, I am really shopping for a navigation system.

More and more businesses are utterly dependent on software, and not just the obvious ones like Amazon.com and Microsoft. Thousands of companies of all sizes that provide products and services across the spectrum of commerce use software in every facet of their operations, management, planning, and sales. The back-office systems that run big companies are all software systems. Hiring and human resource management, investment and arbitrage, purchasing and supply chain management, point-of-sale, operations, and decision support are all pure software systems these days. And the Web dominates all sales and marketing. Live humans are no longer the front line of businesses. Software plays that role instead. Vendors, customers, colleagues, and employees all communicate with companies via software or software-mediated paths.

Goal-Directed Service Design

by Chris Noessel on April 1, 2006 | Comments

Most people think of Goal-Directed Design techniques as focused on product design, but they work equally well for services. A service is comprised of the various "touchpoints" between a customer and a business. Touchpoints include public-facing systems such as web sites and web-enabled software, but can include other channels as well, such as brick-and-mortar stores, points of sale, interactive voice response systems, email and postal mail, too.

A service model best fits offerings that are intangible, distributed in space, or play out over a length of time, especially on a routine basis. Some obvious examples include: electricity, hotels, mobile phone service, or even a government. The touchpoints you design as part of your service are critical to the user's understanding of your brand. Increasingly, many touchpoints are interactive systems rather than human contact, so paying careful attention to the design of these things from the user's goals is vital.

Design Research: Why You Need it

by Steve Calde on March 1, 2003 | Comments

Ever notice how often a product that makes a huge splash at tradeshows fizzles in the marketplace? The story goes like this: Product is introduced at show to much fanfare. News media gives Product lots of press, and consumers everywhere express interest in Product's features and capabilities. Product hits store shelves…and stays there. Some early adopters purchase Product, but it never penetrates into mass consumer markets.

What went wrong? Market research clearly identified potential dollars in target markets just waiting to spend money on the new product. So why did it fail?

Turning Requirements into Product Definition

by Jonathan Korman on August 1, 2002 | Comments

In his newsletter article last month, Ryan Olshavsky outlined an overall process for defining new products and services, taking a look at the start of that process. But how do you get from understanding your users to a vision for an innovative product which will appeal to them?

Bridging the Gap with Requirements Definition

by Ryan Olshavsky on July 1, 2002 | Comments

Developing a new product or service is tricky. When everything goes well, the product can redefine a market or even create an entirely new one, to the benefit of its manufacturer and its consumers. When the product doesn't click with its audience, though, the costs—development, employee, manufacturing—can be staggering. How do you ensure that your new product doesn't flop? One effective method is to conduct a requirements definition phase before developing a new product.

Requirements definition simply means "figuring out what to make before you make it." This process is not unique to software products. Architects, for instance, go through a requirements definition phase before they start construction on a home. They talk to the future home owner and determine how many floors and rooms will be in the house, where the bedroom should be, if there's a deck, and so on. Similarly, in the product development world, requirements definition enables you to make appropriate decisions about the functionality and design of a product before you invest time and money developing it. By bridging the gap between the needs of the market and those of your organization, requirements definition significantly reduces guesswork in technology product planning, and helps ensure that business and engineering are working on the same product.

Innovate, One Step at a Time

by Pat Fleck on March 1, 2002 | Comments

I believe most things run in cycles: the economy, the stock market, fashion, moral codes, even one's own personal status and influence (your personal "stock price," so to speak)—sometimes you're hot, sometimes you're not. The past couple of years have been particularly harsh in reinforcing a history lesson for us: when the pendulum swings very hard and far in one direction, it will most assuredly swing just as decisively in the other eventually.

During recessions, uncertainty prevails, and like a driver trying to weave his way along a mountain road in heavy fog, many businesspeople eventually tire and just pull their businesses over to what seems like a safe embankment, turn off their engines of innovation and progress, and wait for the fog to lift. But how long can one afford to sit on the roadside? At what point does it become riskier to do nothing than to proceed with caution? One has to wonder if there's a better way, a way to keep moving forward in measured, confident increments, rather than eventually creating an additional element of uncertainty by deferring innovation altogether.

The High Risk of Low-Risk Behavior

by Wayne Greenwood on January 1, 2002 | Comments

"Necessity is the mother of taking chances."
-Mark Twain

Occasionally I encounter a motorist on the highway who is driving very slowly, some 20 miles per hour slower than the flow of traffic. This driver undoubtedly believes himself to be driving in a reasonable manner, equating his slow speed with safety. Unfortunately, he fails to recognize the greater risk of a much faster car plowing into him from behind. His slow speed has made his car into a barrier rather than part of the traffic flow, and yet he cruises on, oblivious to the squealing tires and honking horns directly behind him.

Is this really a safe practice? Not on the highways in Silicon Valley.

What We Can Learn From the Fender Stratocaster

by Wayne Greenwood on August 1, 2001 | Comments

I must admit I'm not terribly impressed by the quality of today's software—my benchmark for good product design isn't defined by the output of Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, or other respected software companies. Those companies produce some good work, of course, but the software industry, though no longer in its infancy, still seems to be working through its gawky adolescent stage. So, when I think about high quality products, I think of BMW automobiles, Eames furniture, and the Fender Stratocaster guitar.

Innovating for Humans

by Ernest Kinsolving on May 1, 2001 | Comments

Innovation is an obsession and a watchword throughout the software industry, and it's been widely adopted as a core business goal. But from the consumer's perspective, innovation is only valuable if it solves a problem or provides a new benefit. It can be a bitter pill to swallow, but any product that innovates without adding human value will eventually be displaced by one that gives power and pleasure to those who use it.

Before starting to innovate, it is important to reflect on how different flavors of innovation are perceived by the people who will eventually use a product and what risks and opportunities are associated with each. Then comes the hard part: figuring out what the right innovations are and how to implement them.