At Cooper, we love to share what we learn in our consulting work. We've published and socialized techniques and tools for doing interaction design in our books, at conferences, and through Cooper U. Recently, Apple released the iBooks Author platform, and a few of us have been giving it a test run.

The platform itself has lots of potential. There is much to improve, but the possibilities are interesting and it's too early to critique it too strongly. There's been much talk already about the EULA and whether or not this will disrupt education. It's too early to make that call, though. Our initial impression? It's an accessible tool aimed at a user population that, up to this point, hasn't been equipped to produce engaging and usable interactive educational content.

In our trial run, we produced a look book with some of recent work, including slideshows, imagery and video. It's a little rough in some areas, but we'd love to see what you think. You can download it via the link below and share your thoughts in the comments section.

Download the Cooper iBook.

On Wednesday, we celebrated the release of Designing for the Digital Age, a comprehensive how-to for getting great products built. The release party was hosted by Autodesk in their amazing new Gallery at One Market in San Francisco. The Gallery is filled with cool toys and overlooks the Bay, so it was a pretty ideal setting in which to host a couple hundred of our closest interaction design friends. Big thanks to our friends at Autodesk for a memorable night!

Download the chapter here.
[PDF, 1.4MB, requires Acrobat 7 or higher]

If you've been to the stunning new California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, you may have noticed a number of interactive exhibits in the halls on the first floor. Among them are two game-like pieces by Snibbe Interactive that allow visitors to physically interact with a projected "natural" environment via motion sensors.

Bug Rug by Snibbe Interactive at the Cal Academy of Sciences, from a video of the installation.

One is called Bug Rug and is set on the floor of a Madagascar forest with insects running around under fallen leaves and branches. Visitors can scare the bugs by stomping around, or they can trap them to learn more about them by guiding bait into traps with a very specific gestural interaction. In the other, Arctic Ice, visitors use their shadows to block the sun's rays, allowing ice to form so that a baby polar bear can find its way back to its mother.

After watching kids play with both, and speaking with someone intimately involved in the installation of the works who's watched people interact with both quite a lot, it's pretty clear that visitors tend to be more engaged and successful with Arctic Ice than with Bug Rug. In pondering why this is the case (beyond the obvious fact that for most people, baby polar bears are a lot more compelling than bugs), I've landed upon the theory that the physical interaction of using one's shadow to block the sun's rays is a lot more natural and discoverable than placing one's hands next to each other palm down, with thumbs touching to move things around on the ground.

With the increasing prevalence of physical and gestural interactivity, from the iPhone to Jeff Han's election night Magic Wall spectacle on CNN, to the Wii, it's likely we're all going to be faced with the excitement and challenge of interacting with and designing devices and environments in new ways. One of the biggest challenges associated with physical interactivity is the lack of transparency into the "commands" or actions available with a given device or environment. The graphical user interface was, in many ways, a huge improvement over the previous idioms of the command line because it made it much more obvious what commands were allowable in a given context. Looking into the brave new future of physical interactivity, we're confronted with the need to create idioms and vocabulary that are as discoverable and useful as possible to avoid stepping back into command line-like arcana.

Join us for a beer at the spectacular Autodesk Design Gallery to celebrate the release of Designing for the Digital Age: How to Create Human-Centered Products and Services, the definitive field guide of Cooper's design tools and techniques written by our own Kim Goodwin.

Weds, February 18
6:00 - 8:00

One Market Street
Suite 200
San Francisco
(here's a map)

Please feel free to bring your colleagues, friends and anyone else who's as excited about the practice of design as we are.

Building security requires that all attendees be on the guest list. Please let us know if you'll be able to join us by RSVPing here:

http://crush3r.com/page/pcgsgmmtum
(Anyone can RSVP — just send this along to your friends)

For more about the book, Kim posted a sneak peek at the contents a couple weeks back. And of course, you can pre-order on Amazon.

Today is a big day for me. At long last, my book is going to press. It’s a soup-to-nuts how-to with tons of detail on every aspect of the method as it applies to a wide range of design problems and business situations. Visual, industrial, and interaction design are all integrated in the discussion, as are communication and project management. People have been asking for this book for years, so hopefully it will deliver what you’ve been looking for.

The writing is done. The 300 or so examples, exercises, and illustrations are finished. 750 pages of editing and proofreading and layout and color tweaking…all done. Now, whatever typos exist are going to be there for all time. Of course, there’s plenty still to do between now and when the book lands on shelves around the end of February: a Web site to assemble, a launch party to plan, and a sample chapter or two to select and share with all of you who read the Journal. For now, though, I thought I’d share a peek at the table of contents.

[You can pre-order the book on Amazon; they aren't listing a date yet, but it should be coming out in mid-late February.]

Election Day is finally here, and as ballots are cast and counted, I’m hopeful that voters will declare victory for the candidates and measures that I care most about. But as I review my sample ballot in preparation for my visit to the voting booth, I am discouraged to find that it includes many of the design flaws that the AIGA’s Design for Democracy project has been working to expose and eliminate over the past 8 years. As AIGA reports on their website:

“In July 2007 the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) accepted AIGA Design for Democracy’s research and best practice recommendations for ballot and polling place information design. Guidelines and editable samples were distributed to 6,000 election officials across the country this January. As a result, local jurisdictions now have the tools to apply communication design principles and make voting easier and more comprehensible for all citizens.”

Why, then, am I holding a ballot that violates at least three of the Top 10 election design guidelines, including the use of all caps, center-alignment, and tiny fonts?

As Marcia Lausen notes in Design for Democracy: Ballot + Election Design, typographic specifications are often dictated in well-intentioned but misguided election law. So while the valuable work of Design for Democracy is to be commended, it alone is not enough to bring about the change we need in the design of ballots and other voter information and materials.

So as you head to the polls, review your ballot carefully — not only for its content, but for its design. Make note of the ballot’s flaws, and contact your state and county registrar and representatives to press them to implement the AIGA guidelines. In addition, consider participating in the Polling Place Photo Project, which seeks to document what is politely described as the “richness and complexity" of the voting experience in America.

Most of all, don’t forget to vote!

I’ve been reading Philip Zimbardo’s The Lucifer Effect and thinking a lot about system design as a result. In his words, the book “is a call for a three-part analysis of human action by trying to understand what the individual actors bring to any setting, what situational forces bring out of those actors, and how system forces create and maintain situations.” It’s a rather sobering piece of work, especially as a designer who earns a living designing interactions and systems. The author challenges the common tendency to attribute human failings to an individual’s inner nature, disposition, personality traits, and character and demonstrates how situational and systemic factors seduce ordinarily good people to commit evil acts.

A large part of the book is dedicated to detailed case study of the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, tracking the transformation of happy healthy college students playing randomly assigned the role of prisoner or guard in a mock prison.

Stanford Prison Experiment guard in uniform, from lucifereffect.org.

The experiment was terminated early because of the astounding and terrifying impact it had on the participants. The students assigned to the guard role became sadistic and the prisoners became depressed and showed signs of extreme stress. It was clear from notes and diary entries before, during, and after the experiment that the situational and systemic forces resulted in the students doing things they could never have imagined when outside those force fields.

One of the most interesting books we’ve read recently at the informal Cooper Book Club is Bruce Sterling’s Shaping Things

In the book, Sterling extends some salient technosocial trends to construct a prospective new technology he calls a spime. Sterling lauds designers as the only ones capable of making spimes' (arguably) inevitable emergence into something positive and meaningful, and ultimately, save humanity from its current trajectory of self-destruction. (But no pressure.)

Behavioral economist, Dan Ariely’s delightful first book, Predictably Irrational, heaps yet one more shovel of dirt onto the fresh but deep grave of traditional, rationalist assumptions about human behavior. The book is a simple, personal, easy-to-read account of Ariely’s research conducted over the past 15 or so years. This research was conducted at his various host universities; all of them paragons of ivy-covered scientific rigor, including MIT, Stanford, The University of Virginia, and The University of California at Berkeley.

The clear and inevitable conclusion of his dozens of research papers summarized in this book is simple: humans don’t make rational decisions. What’s more, the irrationality of their choices isn’t random, but can be predicted and measured. While many of the experiments deal with choices regarding cash, several of them cleverly divorce themselves from money to clearly demonstrate that the goofy human behavior is human-related, not cash-related.

He identifies several predictable forces that act upon humans during decision making, causing them to make irrational choices. These include the distorting effect of similar, but slightly inferior, products offered for sale; the distorting effect of simply thinking about numbers; the distorting effect of items offered for free; the distorting effect of sexual arousal; social norms, ownership, procrastination, self-control, clinging to options, expectations, and being observed.

When I picked up Jerome’s Groopman’s How Doctors Think, I imagined that it would give me a useful window into the mind of the busy clinician. On medical projects we often find it a bit challenging to get enough research time with physicians. (Aside from maybe lawyers and CEO’s, there are no better exemplars of the “time is money” mentality—American doctors, in particular.)

Dave, Doug and Noah learning how surgeons think.

While I appreciated the informal history of medical education, interesting anecdotes of diagnostic challenges and satisfying dose of medical atmosphere, I learned just as much about design and design research as I did about medicine. (I'm not surprised to discover that I'm not the first to make this connection. In her blog, Elegant Hack, Christina Wodke discusses how she thinks design education should be thought of more like medical education, with a focus on gaining experience over several years in industry, rather than just technical skill in a design program. She'll get no argument out of me there.)

The part of the book that I found most striking is Groopman's discussion of what he calls "classic cognitive errors" in diagnosing and treating medical conditions. I have made and seen each of these errors in understanding people and devising products and services to meet their needs. While explicit knowledge of these categories of flawed thinking isn't a guarantee against them, I do think that by naming them and affirming their reality (often by reference to the work of psychologists), this book can help us remember the kind of mistakes that top-notch professionals make when they're tired, stressed, egotistical, or just lazy.