Let's presume for the moment that interaction design can be perfected and delivered to your organization in a tidy, shiny bundle of brilliance. Have you now got a magic talisman that will protect you from competition and summon market share? Of course not. Design is just the beginning.

Like any piece of good advice, your organization must be able to hear the design and then act on it for it to do any good. Take a look at this checklist to see if your organization is design ready.

We're working on a larger post about the awesome IxDA 2012 in Dublin last week, but in the meantime, I wanted to chat separately about sketchnoting.

I'm a drawer, there's no doubt about it. I can barely manage to consider a design problem before I'm reaching for a pen and paper, or my Tablet PC and a stylus and cranking open OneNote for an explanatory drawing or mind map. But that got taken to the next level when I attended "Visual Thinking Through Sketchnotes," a workshop by MJ Broadbent & Eva-Lotta Lamm.

In it we covered the basics of sketching and then went further into what that means for capturing the complex ideas communicated in lectures and speeches. I was hooked, and challenged. I spent the next three days both enamored of the excellent ideas being presented (high marks on all four things I look for in presentations, nearly across the board), but also trying my new skills at sketchnoting. Here's the whole set.

While in Moscow, Alan and Chris were interviewed by Igor and Anton Gladkoborodov, who are with edutainment blog Theory and Practice to talk about education and learning in the modern world.

Theory and Practice began the interview with two large questions.

Igor Gladkoborodov: In your blog you write a lot about the specifics of the post-industrial era. The new economy heavily influences all aspects of human life, and now we are entering an era of post-everything. I am most interested in the aspect of education, what can you say about the post-education era?

Anton Gladkoborodov: In the industrialized world, education was reduced mainly to the technology of working with a tool or a machine. Similarly, mental activity was usually reduced to a set of algorithms. Today, we need to raise another kind of worker, one that is more flexible and dynamic. However, modern education does not meet the requirements of modern times; it is still based on the principle of factories. What, in your opinion, needs to be done to education?

It’s a good, long conversation, and if you’re down with the Russian you can read the original at the Theory and Practice website. (Special thanks to our friends at Innova for providing the source translation for us.) Below we’ve excerpted some of the most interesting stuff, and arranged it so we don’t sound as jetlagged and meandering as we actually were.

One team returns from lovely Brasil, while another is off in lovely Japan. As we wrap us this last full week before Thanksgiving, our collective Internet attention was drawn by notions of the future, political wranglings, and thinking deeply about design details.

First, we're keenly interested in Congress's discussions of the Stop Online Piracy Act and the effects it could have on the way people use the Internet.

Author's aside: I personally think it's crazy. It's like legislating the Salem Witch Trials only instead of "witch!" the entertainment industry can scream "piracy!" and squash domains at will. Here's hoping that digital censorship gets nipped right in the bud.

Next, we are proud to post video from Alan's talk at the Commonwealth Club, from September 13th of this year. See clips below with thoughts about education, innovative teams, software alchemy, and the arc of technology. Set aside an hour and sixteen minutes and you can watch the full thing.

We loved reading the "one wish"es that the TED audience had for their computers. (Unsurprising spoiler: Most people wanted computers to be more human.) Thanks to James Patten of Patten Studio for asking the question.

Our mad scientist dreams were kindled with knowledge of Google's secret futures lab dubbed Google X.

So we had loads of fun doing our Halloween personas this year. Seems like a lot of folks enjoyed reading them, too. Being the nerds that we know can sometimes be, we'd like to share a few of the headier thoughts we talked about while going through the exercise.

About the presentation

A few folks asked about this presentation format. Is this really the way we document personas? Can it be this simple? We document them in the ways that work best for our clients, so they take many forms, but yes, this presentation is one we're using lately for an "overview" slide in a presentation deck. Since we want to get the team into an intentional stance when looking at the overview, we like to have a big image that registers as believable. The information contained on the right is the minimum amount of reminders about who they are and what we need to keep in mind as we do goal-directed design: A telling quote, goals listed that embody the voice of the persona, a name, and a role. Of course we had a little fun with the format with Destro and Metansiptah that we might not ordinarily have, but half the fun of this exercise was in picking which rules to break.

About the content

The idea was short and full of promise, but the execution proved more difficult for a number of reasons.

Personas aren't individuals

The first thing that came up was a reminder about the essential nature of personas. When first thinking about which monsters to do, I offered to do Dr. Frankenstein and Igor, but Jenea was sharp enough to catch the mismatch: Personas aren't individuals. They're archetypes that represent large populations. You can't just do Dr. Frankenstein. He's not a persona. He's a...umm...person. So adhering to this principle excluded many monsters we might have done which are individuals. For example, there's only one Creature from the Black Lagoon, so "horrible sea creature" seemed to not fit, even though we <3 the Creature and had a team chomping at the bit to go with him.

Personas are based on research

Personas are best when based on research. Since we couldn't get first-hand research for fictional creatures, we looked to the next best thing: domain research. To do this we looked at web resources (thank you, Wikipedia), a few books from our shelves, and every related movie and story that came to mind. This gave us the range of "individuals" from which we drew. It was, as you can imagine, some fun research.

We try to avoid cartoonishness

That the modeled users were fictional created another problem: How to avoid making them too cartoonish? Yes, we created them for a larf, but we didn't want them to be cereal-box versions of the monsters. Cartoonish personas are much more easily disregarded as design tools or market segments, rather than engaging, intentional agents with real needs and challenges. So we tried to make sure that our vampires weren't "Drac McVampires" whose main goal was to "Zuk your bloot!" but instead had at least a little more realism to them. (The delightful goals for the Zombie Who Looks like an Undead Crispin Glover were a deliberate exception.)

Personas often are created with a target technology in mind

We typically steer goals so that they're useful in the context of the design problem at hand. For instance, everyone (living) has a goal of "Enjoy unhindered breathing" but it's so generic that it's not useful in most contexts. Without a target technology in mind (maybe we'll try that next year) our monster's goals couldn't really lean toward any particular way, and so had to be more about characterization.

Personas have life goals

We distinguish between types of goals, and one category is life goals, which are those things the persona wants to accomplish in his or her lifetime. It proved a little challenging for the undead personas. What is a life goal when there's potentially no end of it in sight?

How do we handle anti-social goals?

One of the most challenging aspects of these spooks and monsters was their clearly anti-social goals. Yes, Alexi in wolf form would want to "rip deep into pulsing viscera" but we as designers certainly don't want to help him do that. Perhaps another article can be devoted to handling this in the real-world, but when thinking about how to help them, we tried hard not to become horrible accomplices. That helped with some of the humor, too, as we obviously dodged the obvious.

Turns out they may be ideal

We were ultimately surprised at some of the promise of these personas. It started as a joke to say that our ghost Juan couldn't touch physical objects, but we realized that we can in fact handle that with gestural and voice input mechanisms. Would Juan be an ideal persona for such an interfaceless system? Or in another example, both Alexi our werewolf and Romulus our sasquatch valued staying out of the public eye. Would they be a useful stand-in for people concerned about the looming threat of ubiquitous surveillance? Of course we wouldn't suggest either for a real client, but designing for the most extremely-constrained persona can sometimes result in the best design.

Hoping you and yours had a happy Halloween!

We're thinkers as part of being designers, and any exercise that gives us a new perspective on the tools and methods we use is a worthwhile one. But our main point in doing this was to have a bit of fun and help celebrate one of our favorite holidays. So now that the holiday is past we can get back to work. And since it's late and dark here in the Cooper offices, we'll just turn back to our computers and...wait. What was that sound?

Cooper teams are jamming on a ton of projects, but it was a rich week with lots of things catching our collective eye.

One team returned from a trip to Russia, where Kendra taught a great course on interaction design practice, followed by Alan and Chris’ speaking at a mini-conference of talented and energetic Muscovite designers. The team reports it is missing its new friends. (привет, y’all!)

We liked the lists from Susan Weinschenk's article The Psychologist’s View of UX Design. We're fond of that elephant story, too.

We both marveled and giggled at Siri, and eagerly read the opinions on them. Two in particular...

• Quoras folk opine about why Siri is important
• TechCrunch talks about what this means to search.

Our artistic imaginations were set on fire with the promise of writeable circuitry. (Way to go, U of I!)

Like you, I’ve been to my share of presentations. I’m that annoying guy near the back who takes a lot of notes during it: jotting down the awesomeness, the nifty sound bytes, the structure, and the ideas it sparks. If the thing is failing, I’ll jot that down, too, and try to suss out the reason to make sure that when I present I don’t make the same mistake.

After years of doing this, I’ve come to group these successes and failures into four big criteria that every conference presentation ought to have. I’m going to share them with you now in the hopes that a) I’m right and b) more presentations will fall into the “awesome” rather than “regrettable” category.

Users use, bosses win, and it's better if we treat users like bosses.

Now I don't mean "boss" in the "supervisor" sense. I mean it in the internet meme sense, which traces its roots to The Lonely Island rap as parodied by Saturday Night Live. (It's SNL, so can be slightly NSFW), and in the sense of someone in charge, confident, and getting things done.

For those who have gone to Black Rock to watch fire or those on the East Coast still dealing with water, here's what went down around Cooper while you were dealing with the elements.

• Opinions are polarized regarding the in-progress Windows Explorer
• We wasted a little time laughing at GifTV
• We enjoyed the design challenges of our second round of "office hours" with the smart health startups at Rock Health.
• Two products for differently-abled people caught our attentions: Sony's augmented reality "subtitle glasses" add subtitles to movies as they're playing so deaf people can enjoy them. Local San Franciscan Steve Hoefer's Tacit glove gives blind people inaudible "sonar."
• The Kno iPad apps made us want to head back to school.
• We've been saying that First Name/Last Name form fields are the wrong way to go for a while now. We're glad to the see the WC3 had our backs.
• We nodded while eating cereal and watching the demo video for the NYT R&D breakfast table reader.
• We also loved the dashboard on one of Chris Reccardi's illustrations from his Go exhibit in Melbourne.
• We got our last votes in for SXSW 2012 panels (If you're of a mind, consider one of ours.)

Oh hey, know anyone interested in interning with us? Send them our way (or send us to them).

It’s rare, but it sometimes happens. You will be in an interview and you hear something that doesn’t quite ring true. Knowing the warning signs and what to do in these edge cases will help you make course corrections during the interview so that it is still useful.

Screen capture from Rock Star Games' title L.A. Noire