Making Material You

In established professional sports, technology often seems like an afterthought, applied like a band-aid, forgotten entirely, or employed in unimaginative ways. Early this April, a start-up league called the National Pro Grid League approached Cooper with a new challenge – to help them introduce a new sport that has integrated technology from the start. Cooper has been worked closely with the NPGL to design the fan experience, through interactive tools, infographics and Jumbotron graphics.

HOAS Pasila, located in Central Helsinki, provides a home for 250 foreign students. The residents are mostly European exchange students who come to study at one of the higher education institutions surrounding Helsinki. For many of them, the building is their first home as well as their first taste of Finland. The building is a 1970’s architectural gem, which was falling into disrepair. The lack of feeling of ownership led to some problems - like misuse of the building and its facilities. Our challenge was to make this building feel like home. With a little colorful chalkboard paint and some bold typography, we made the interiors part of the architecture and a vibrant space for living. We painted the hallways from floor to ceiling, turning them into chalkboards, instead of forbidding writing on the walls, we began promoting it. As a result, the building became an interactive participant in the student community: “talking” to its residents, encouraging them to get to know each other and do things together, creating a unique environment they could call their own.

21 Balancoires (21 Swings) is an urban scale collective instrument, a game where together we achieve better things than separately. The installation consists of a series of 21 musical swings. When in motion, each swing triggers different notes. When used all together, the swings compose a musical piece in which certain melodies emerge only through cooperation. It's a game where, from the start, you need to adjust to the actions of others.The notes that are played are determined by how high a person swings. The color of the swing indicates the instrument it plays: piano, harp, guitar, vibraphone. The instruments are distributed differently within each set of three swings to create different musical configurations.When multiple swings move in synchronicity, a mini scale is played, revealing more notes and melodies. When all swings are in use, a secret musical mode is activated to give a special reward to players a synthesizer sound plays on all swings and transforms the experience.The result is a giant collective instrument that stimulates ownership of the space, bringing together people of all ages and backgrounds, and creating a place for playing and exchanging in the middle of the city center.

We saw a great opportunity to build better teams by freeing up scouts in the NFL to spend more time actually scouting for great players than searching, collecting, and entering data. “We’re not looking for the best players, we’re looking for the best players for the 49ers. The more you can analyze data, the better decisions you can make.” – Jed York, 49ers CEO The scouting process is complicated in nature. In order to evaluate players, the scouts watch players all over the country both in person as well as on film. They then form their opinions about the players and enter their evaluations in the system of record. Information also trickles in at different times from multiple sources like medical reports or workout reports at various football events. All this information needs to be looked at collectively. The scouts need to support their views with confidence and ensure that pertinent and up-to-date information about players is reflected at all times of the year. The management needs to be able to quickly access the most relevant information about a player and make decisions on whether to draft, claim, trade or cut a player.

My colleague, Kent Eisenhuth, and I were asked by Keysight Technologies, the world’s leading electronic measurement company, to redesign the software that controlled their line of Atomic Force Microscopes.

Across the globe, User Experience (UX) Research teams invest months in user interviews and weeks in crafting a set of Personas. A User Persona, is a detailed and semi-fictional representation of a target user, based on research and insights. Yet, these Personas often fall short of their intended impact on UX and products. We embarked on a mission to enhance Personas, ensuring they deliver their true value in understanding users and facilitating exceptional user experiences. After numerous iterations, we developed the Persona Mapper—a tool designed to revitalize Personas.

The U-Bot is a robot powered by ai behaviors and the aim is to make blind children aware of the space around them. The important phase of this project is been the research part focused on the available product on the market to help blind people have a better understanding of “orientation and mobility”.

The Waste Land for iPad is the result of a year long collaboration between the poem’s publisher Faber and Faber, and Touch Press a digital publisher specialising in highly interactive books. Our aim was to bring the poem to a new audience and to use the special capabilities of the iPad to give that audience the tools to appreciate perhaps one of the greatest works of 20th Century literature. To that end we offer synchronised readings and performances of the poem by, among others, T S Eliot himself, Sir Alec Guinness and Fiona Shaw. We also provide 35 expert perspectives on the poem in the form of filmed interviews with Seamus Heaney, Jeanette Winterson and others. Extensive and detailed notes can be accessed to explain the many references and historic allusions. And Eliot’s original manuscript can be displayed, including Ezra Pound’s extensive edits and deletions, to show how the poem took shape. But at the core of the iPad edition is the poem itself, beautifully typeset and, with a quick turn of the device, uncluttered and carefully presented without embellishment.

The idea of Stic Stac Code blocks was born when I realised that most of the augmented reality (AR) based mobile applications out there let children only consume digital content. These apps impress you with polished 3D models, textures and animations, but they lack cultivating creativity amongst its users. Creativity lies in the power of Making and Tinkering and I believe a better part of technology should be designed to foster learning. Thus the question was – How might I design a creative tool that let children manipulate, create and express their unique content?

The Inc. 5000 Marketplace is a virtual world created for the Inc. 5000 Vision Conference where attendees could meet other attendees, share ideas and make lasting connections. The Marketplace is the first-of-its-kind, virtual experience specially themed for the conference.We integrated Inc. 5000’s history of honoring the fastest-growing private companies in America by designing the world around a fictitious Main Street, the heart of the Marketplace. Here, honorees from all over the country converged to walk the red carpet, play a round of golf, socialize at the virtual bar, take pictures at the art gallery and challenge one another with social games at the recreation center.The Marketplace combines the beauty of the real world, walking down the street with a friend chatting, with the power of a virtual world — where people from all over can immediately be present and explore. We achieve this through playful design, integrating game technologies and enabling all attendees to participate.Honorees poured glasses of bubbly at home and then joined in the fun with their live-streaming avatars. They bumped into friends on Main Street, popped into the local art gallery to add their photos to a mosaic, and wandered into the local bar to play trivia quizzes together. Finally, honorees stopped by the Inc. 5000 theater to celebrate each other’s accomplishments with a group photo. The challenge was to successfully create a virtual version of attending an event, where chance meetings and side conversations make the night that much more fun and interesting.