Is this you?
“Why can’t we ship a really transformative product”
“How do I get my team to be more innovative”
“My executives expect our products to become more Cool”
By attending this workshop, you’ll learn:
- How Cool products tap into our experience of joy and delight
- How the Cool Concepts change the way you think about designing products
- The design principles behind the Cool user experience
- What to redesign in your products to increase your Cool factor
Intentionally Design for Cool — Create that transformative experience with your products
This intensive, hands-on workshop is for anyone who has a part in defining and designing things people use—products, systems, services, or processes. You’ll immerse yourself in our research data and learn how to intentionally design for Cool.
What makes cool products Cool? To find out, we immersed ourselves in the experiences of everyday people as they used their coolest products. Field data from 90 consumers and business professionals from 15 to 60 revealed a set of concepts identifying the factors that drive the cool user experience.
The Wheel of Joy and The Triangle of Design articulate the key elements design teams need to consider when designing for cool. Putting them into practice helps infuse your design process with actionable, innovative thinking. The result: products that produce a cool user experience.
The Wheel of Joy represents the what of a cool product. Joy and delight come from accomplishing what you need to in life, connecting to people you care about, expressing your unique self, and simply enjoying sensory stimulation.
The Triangle of Design represents the how of a cool product. Joy in use comes from product design that lets users get directly to their intent with minimal hassle or learning.
Come and learn about intentional design for product transformation.
This two day workshop presents these concepts with examples from our data relevant to business and consumer products alike. The Cool Concepts have been validated with 2000 people surveyed worldwide verifying that we have indeed uncovered the core factors associated with the cool user experience
Who should attend
Individuals or teams who have a hand in defining or designing products or business systems; product managers, designers, developers, marketing professionals, project managers, business analysts, user experience professionals, quality managers and consultants.
Bring your whole team to the workshop and we’ll tailor the breakout work to your specific product focus.
This exciting and ground breaking two day workshop is led by Karen Holtzblatt, CEO and Co-founder of InContext
Karen is the visionary behind InContext’s unique customer-centered design approach, Contextual Design. Karen’s combination of technological and psychological expertise provides the creative framework for driving development, innovative designs, and design processes.
Recognized as a leader in requirements and design, Karen has pioneered transformative ideas and design approaches throughout her career. Karen introduced Contextual Inquiry, now the industry standard for gathering field data to understand how technology impacts the way people work. Contextual Inquiry and the design processes based on it provide a revolutionary approach for designing new products and systems based on a deep understanding of the context of use. Contextual Inquiry forms the base of Contextual Design, InContext’s full customer-centered design process.
Karen led the research for the Cool Project and developed the Cool Concepts which will form the basis for her new book What Makes Things Cool?
Karen co-founded InContext Enterprises in 1992 to use Contextual Design techniques to coach product teams and deliver customer-centered designs to businesses across multiple industries. The books, Contextual Design: Defining Customer Centered Systems, and Rapid Contextual Design are used by companies and universities all over the world. As a member of ACM CHI (the Association for Computer-Human Interaction), Karen was awarded membership to the CHI Academy, honoring the most significant contributors, and received the first Lifetime Award for Practice, presented to her in 2010 for her impact on the field. Karen’s extensive experience with teams and all types of work and life practice underlies the innovation and reliable quality consistently delivered by InContext’s teams.
Karen also has more than 25 years of teaching experience, professionally and in university settings. She holds a doctorate in applied psychology from the University of Toronto.
What you’ll learn and practice
Wednesday, June 20
We teach you what the Cool concepts are and what it means to apply them to design thinking.
Introduction to the principles of Cool: The Wheel of Joy
- Walking the data. We lead your team in immersing themselves in data relevant to the Wheel of Joy
- Discussion of issues and implications of Wheel of Joy data
Introduction to the principles of Cool: The Triangle of Design
- Walking the data. We lead your team in immersing themselves in data relevant to the Triangle of Design
- Discussion of issues and implications of Triangle of Design data
Thursday, June 21
Get practical experience how to apply the Cool concepts to product design
Introduction to design implications for each of the Cool Concepts.
- We use an example product to walk through guided questions showing the application of the Cool Concepts
Break up into small groups, by company or product interest area.
- Stimulus questions for each factor facilitate design thinking for a target product area
- Teams work out several ideas for product transformation
Sharing ideas. Each small team shares ideas and discusses insights and then gets feedback from the group
You leave with a new understanding of how to design for the cool user experience. And if you bring your product team you leave with a set of product ideas and an action list you can start working on now.