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.

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Are designers responsible for the impact of their work upon human behavior?
Is it actually possible to create "connected" experiences across devices?
Do designers need to speed up, or do stakeholders need to slow down?

In January, Angel Anderson, Mikkel Michelsen, Robb Stevenson, Lou Lenzi, Donald Chestnut, and I poked and prodded at these topics during the Interaction 13 conference. About 500 people attended the debate, and they threw their own perspectives into the mix in the latter part of the conversation. Have a listen in the video below.

(And thanks to SapientNitro for the opportunity to meet such interesting people, expand my own perspective, and make use of what I learned on my high school debate team. Ha!)

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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Polls are open for the People’s Choice Award for the shortlisted Interaction Awards! Check out the work that Cooper did with Practice Fusion's EMR ipad app to help liberate doctors from their desktops.

To vote, all you need to do is go here, click on the grey sticker, register (or sign in), and then cast your vote!

If you’ll be in attendance at Interaction13, Director of Interaction Design Stefan Klocek will be available to demo the app and answer any questions.

Cooper’s holding it down with some other great events at Interaction13 too.

• Stop by for a 10-minute talk by Susan Dybbs about finding the beauty in failure.
• Registration is open for workshops about harnessing the brainpower of your stakeholders by Greg Schuler, and designing the culture of your organization with Kendra Shimmell and Teresa Brazen.

In August, Cooper Directors Chris and Stefan discussed implicit interactions at Device Design Day 2012, as well as a new metaphor for thinking about emerging technology. Check out the video of their talk below.

We're working on a larger post about the awesome IxDA 2012 in Dublin last week, but in the meantime, I wanted to chat separately about sketchnoting.

I'm a drawer, there's no doubt about it. I can barely manage to consider a design problem before I'm reaching for a pen and paper, or my Tablet PC and a stylus and cranking open OneNote for an explanatory drawing or mind map. But that got taken to the next level when I attended "Visual Thinking Through Sketchnotes," a workshop by MJ Broadbent & Eva-Lotta Lamm.

In it we covered the basics of sketching and then went further into what that means for capturing the complex ideas communicated in lectures and speeches. I was hooked, and challenged. I spent the next three days both enamored of the excellent ideas being presented (high marks on all four things I look for in presentations, nearly across the board), but also trying my new skills at sketchnoting. Here's the whole set.

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While in Moscow, Alan and Chris were interviewed by Igor and Anton Gladkoborodov, who are with edutainment blog Theory and Practice to talk about education and learning in the modern world.

Theory and Practice began the interview with two large questions.

Igor Gladkoborodov: In your blog you write a lot about the specifics of the post-industrial era. The new economy heavily influences all aspects of human life, and now we are entering an era of post-everything. I am most interested in the aspect of education, what can you say about the post-education era?

Anton Gladkoborodov: In the industrialized world, education was reduced mainly to the technology of working with a tool or a machine. Similarly, mental activity was usually reduced to a set of algorithms. Today, we need to raise another kind of worker, one that is more flexible and dynamic. However, modern education does not meet the requirements of modern times; it is still based on the principle of factories. What, in your opinion, needs to be done to education?

It’s a good, long conversation, and if you’re down with the Russian you can read the original at the Theory and Practice website. (Special thanks to our friends at Innova for providing the source translation for us.) Below we’ve excerpted some of the most interesting stuff, and arranged it so we don’t sound as jetlagged and meandering as we actually were.

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Practice Fusion, the leading provider of health records software for medical professionals, has published a nice recap of their user conference, Connect11, where Alan Cooper spoke about the role of interaction design in health care. Among the questions answered - "what do you get when you cross a computer with a doctor's office?"

At the 13 minute mark, Stefan Klocek presents a prototype of Practice Fusion's new iPad app.

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Like you, I’ve been to my share of presentations. I’m that annoying guy near the back who takes a lot of notes during it: jotting down the awesomeness, the nifty sound bytes, the structure, and the ideas it sparks. If the thing is failing, I’ll jot that down, too, and try to suss out the reason to make sure that when I present I don’t make the same mistake.

After years of doing this, I’ve come to group these successes and failures into four big criteria that every conference presentation ought to have. I’m going to share them with you now in the hopes that a) I’m right and b) more presentations will fall into the “awesome” rather than “regrettable” category.

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At the recent Interaction 11 conference, I spoke of the growing importance of visual interface design to both brand and user experience in an increasingly digital world. In this new world, visual interaction designers face big challenges and bigger expectations, from both users and clients.

While designing visual interfaces for dense, complex products, designers can also influence brand perception by creating experiences that are both memorable and useful. In my session, I discuss how to design a unique visual interface that puts the needs of the users first; how to add surprise and delight to critical moments of the experience; and how to use craftsmanship and attention to detail to set your design apart in a visually complex medium. Finally, I talk about how visual designers can effectively frame conversations with stakeholders about brand and experience by using personas, experience attributes, and stories to convey design ideas. Enjoy!

Presentation on Slideshare

You can also view a crisper version of the slides on Slideshare: Slideshare.

Related Reading

• A unified approach to visual and interaction design
• Using research to end visual design debates
• The power of rich visual modeless feedback
• Take the visual interface design class
• The litl: a design miracle!

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