May 9, 2012 @ 16:30, Room: 15
Chair: Karen Holtzblatt,
Course 31: Designing for 'Cool': Making Compelling Products and Applications - Course
Contribution & Benefit: This course presents a set of core attributes that make products and applications Cool, with illustrations from real products and services. We also at the challenges organizations face in creating Cool.
Abstract » Design practitioners know that part of their job is to create products and applications with usability in mind. Making products and applications learnable, efficient and pleasant to use are certainly goals, but every designer dreams of creating something more �something so great that people crave it, long for it, must have it. Marketers call it �a must have�, �compelling�, or �insanely great�. But most of the rest of us just call it Cool.
Over the past decades, Cool has evolved into a marketing imperative: an overarching requirement for many designs. Companies spend billions organizing to cultivate �innovation� so they can reliably create it. And a new generation, with vastly different expectations on Cool design, is coming of age. But Cool is hard to pin down�there�s no accepted way to define it, measure it, or design for it. Like glamour, it is an ineffable yet powerful quality depending on a host of subtle factors.
This course presents a set of core attributes that make products and applications Cool. These design attributes emerged from an extensive cross-generational contextual research project understanding how people from ages 15 to 60 experience �cool� and its relationship to value and impact on their lives.
We present core Cool concepts based on the research, using real product and service examples to illustrate the material. We include the application of Cool concepts to productivity business applications. Attendees participate in an exercise to evaluate products they use, own and/or are designing to how Cool attributes apply and affect them. We end with an analysis of the development of key cool technologies revealing the real effort required to create cool products. We look at the problems organizations face in creating Cool, and discuss the challenges inherent in large organizations as they attempt to move toward a more innovative culture.
Over the past decades, Cool has evolved into a marketing imperative: an overarching requirement for many designs. Companies spend billions organizing to cultivate �innovation� so they can reliably create it. And a new generation, with vastly different expectations on Cool design, is coming of age. But Cool is hard to pin down�there�s no accepted way to define it, measure it, or design for it. Like glamour, it is an ineffable yet powerful quality depending on a host of subtle factors.
This course presents a set of core attributes that make products and applications Cool. These design attributes emerged from an extensive cross-generational contextual research project understanding how people from ages 15 to 60 experience �cool� and its relationship to value and impact on their lives.
We present core Cool concepts based on the research, using real product and service examples to illustrate the material. We include the application of Cool concepts to productivity business applications. Attendees participate in an exercise to evaluate products they use, own and/or are designing to how Cool attributes apply and affect them. We end with an analysis of the development of key cool technologies revealing the real effort required to create cool products. We look at the problems organizations face in creating Cool, and discuss the challenges inherent in large organizations as they attempt to move toward a more innovative culture.