Working Backwards: Integrating Design into your Business. Alan Cooper

It seems every business person has gotten the memo by now: get design and win big. Companies everywhere are hiring, contracting, acquiring, and training designers. But is it really making any difference to your bottom line? The solution is more than just employing designers: you need to effectively integrate design into your business, and that is a significant design problem in itself. Alan Cooper co-founded Cooper in 1992. He is widely known for his role in humanizing technology through his groundbreaking work in software design. He is also the author of the books About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design (editions 1-4) and The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity. Widely recognized as the “Father of Visual Basic," Alan also created the goal-directed design methodology and invented personas as practical interaction design tools to create high-tech products that delight user's sensibilities. “The future,” Alan reminds us, “is right in front of us, unobscured by anything other than our inability to recognize it.”