What makes things cool karen holtzblatt

Life-centered design calls for reconceiving activities in terms of the chunks of time and the amount of attention we want to devote to them:. Connection between people is basic to human existence. Whether it's in the context of family, friendship, community, or one's career, reaching out to transcend our aloneness is as necessary as breathing.

The joy of connection is not about the number of friends you have on a social network site; it's not about the usability of collaboration tools; it's not about being able to see each other with video.

Central to the cool experience of connection is the way cool tools help make relationships that matter more real and manageable within the unstoppable momentum of life.

The mobile phone, texting, and collaborative little games help us maintain our relationships by "dropping in" on those who matter to us more frequently. A relationship with nothing to do and nothing to talk about is not a relationship at all. Within a community context, online communities like Ravelry. Sites bringing together communities of interest create tangible community where only dispersed people existed before.

Taken together, cool tools reveal the work of relationships and how by simplifying that work, relationships so essential to the feeling of connection can better fit into the unstoppable momentum of life. Figuring out who you are and how you will contribute to the world is the basic life task [ 7 ]. Children dress up and play make-believe to practice the behaviors of society and their role in it.

This quest for self-definition is most intense in adolescence but continues over the lifecycle as people become independent adults, professionals, partners, home owners, parents, grandparents, and retirees.

Just as relationships need conversational content, so too do we need ideas of who we might be. Cool tools bring us a way to see what others our age or stage in life do to become more adult, parent well, or make the transition to grandparents.

We can check with friends and media showing people "like me" to find out if our choices are reasonable. When we feel like we have made a choice that fits our real selves, we feel the joy of a centered self.

Since Neolithic men recorded their accomplishments in cave paintings that still speak to us today, people have sought to record and share their life story. YouTube is cool not only because it provides a way to share video, collects potential conversational content, and relieves boredom in dead time.

YouTube is also cool because everyone can announce their existence and become a movie star. Facebook is cool not only because it creates connection, but also because it is becoming the living cave wall. The joy of pure sensation starts with an infant staring at patterns or a child pouring sand over her body.

The cool of sensation falls into two camps: sensory immersion, creating "time out of time," and moments of pure sensual delight. Products that offer sensory immersion take us away from the everyday.

Music, a really large TV, and the graphics of games deliver transformative cool when done well because they fully and completely absorb us. They become our core leisure activities absorbing us for longer periods of time. They are cool because they take us away from the everyday. Elements of sensual delight can be built into any product: a compelling color like a lime-green coffeemaker, the visceral sensation of suede on the Droid cover calling to be touched, or the soothing sound of crickets coming from an alarm.

Sometimes there is a twist in the sensation that ups the ante when a digital product recapitulates the real: digital photo quality that is "like real," digital flashcards that flip and generate that tiny smile of playfulness. The key for design is making sensation a natural part of the product and experience.

These sensations and natural playfulness, although not the dominant reason something is cool, still draw us in and create a smile. They create a cool moment. When done really well good sensations make work like play without feeling gratuitous. They augment the other cool factors, enhancing the overall coolness of a product.

The core of joy comes from how the factors in the Wheel of Joy impact life. The Triangle of Design makes this joy in life accessible through creating joy in use. The Triangle of Design defines the factors which taken together increase or decrease the overall cool experience; they ultimately enhance or undermine the joy of life that the product is trying to provide.

Joy in use comes from a holistic approach to providing and accessing capabilities that transform life. Direct into Action. Cool tools let people achieve their intent in a way that is most natural without stopping to have to learn, figure out, find, orient, negotiate logistics, or even decide.

The most direct experience returns people to their original interactions with the world. Design for Direct into Action is possible today because technology has matured enough to build much more directly upon these original capacities.

Today smartphones feel like an appendage, as immediate as any sense, allowing us to acquire information about the world or take a desired action. From thought to result, it works magically.

Design for "back to origins" affects the interaction paradigm we can now use to access product capability. But Direct into Action is equally about that capability itself. Instant on, one-click to buy, and even getting absolutely everything needed to use a product in the box let us move instantly into action.

Bringing all data and function needed into one place, organized so that we don't have to orient or figure out a page is direct because we can see, decide, and do in an instant. It takes us directly from desire to result. Today's technology makes real Direct into Action possible and that in turn makes living within the unstoppable momentum of life also possible. The principles of Direct into Action call for an entirely new way of designing.

Just as natural language commands overtook cryptic comments, WYSIWYG enabled direct writing interaction with the page, and drag-and-drop let us manipulate the digital world directly, touch interfaces and small targeted mobile apps let us fulfill our intent in the minute-by-minute context of life. The Hassle Factor. The Hassle Factor is the evil twin of Direct into Action. Hassle is a natural part of life. Clothes are a hassle compared with nudity. Buttons were a hassle until zippers and then Velcro were introduced.

But Velcro can get clogged up and stop working, so Velcro is a hassle too. Every invention removes hassle from what came before it, but every invention also introduces new hassle. The design challenge of the Hassle Factor is to figure out how to remove tool and life hassle while introducing the least possible amount of new hassle.

The Hassle Factor points to the experience of relief , that "ahhhh! The cool of the Hassle Factor includes the physical manifestations of technology. Over and over our users told us, "De-junk me! The Hassle Factor asks us to raise our collective design consciousness to design for the hassle balancing act: How much hassle can we remove and how much have we created anew with our great new tool?

But when we get it right, we achieve the "ahhhh! The Delta. The Delta is the context necessary to achieve Direct into Action from the very beginning of product use. Can you intentionally design a product that is Cool? View 2 excerpts, cites background. Capturing "cool": Measures for assessing coolness of technological products. Measuring the coolness of interactive products: the COOL questionnaire. Highly Influenced. View 5 excerpts, cites background. Situated Techno-Cools: factors that contribute to making technology cool in a given context of use.

View 4 excerpts, cites background. Understanding "cool" in human-computer interaction research and design. View 1 excerpt, cites background. Communicating user research in order to drive design and product decisions. The way that these core concepts work, the cool concepts, the more of them you touch, the cooler your thing is.

The cool concepts are proprietary. Each concept has a set of 10 phrases. Can we maybe use an example? The first product that probably did this for a lot of people was the spreadsheet. No really! It made the first Apple computer. In point of fact, it in one step was a sweeping change. My daughter works for Google, by the way. You could read your book in the line now. We are now designing for time—tiny bits of time at work or at home.

Also, by the way, I think a lot of us are not paying bills or reading, but playing Candy Crush. Well, the joy, the cool, is getting your overwhelming life done. And the requirement for Google Glass is, does it help me get my life done? Also, the always-on aspect is a problem.

People break up the day and self-interrupt. What I basically think is that dads have been sticking their nose in the paper and hiding out in the bathroom for a very long time. Technology is revealing what is core about humans. Escapism, accomplishment. But connection too: Cool tools are allowing distributed families and friendship groups to stay connected. Three of the core principles have to do with how often you touch, the conversational content, the collaboration and planning.

What is Google Glass doing for connection? Article describes results of a research project conducted by InContext Design and focusing on what makes products and services cool. The research resulted to two concepts, the Wheel of Joy and the Triangle of Design that define the aspects of life that designers should focus on to design for cool. The Wheel of Joy consists of four segments: accomplishment, connection, identity, and sensation.

Accomplishment refers to the joy of accomplishing an intent. Intents are larger than tasks and thus the cool of accomplishment changes the design focus from tasks to life Holtzblatt names this new design approach as life-centered design.

Connection refers to our basic need to connect with other people.