The Art of Healing

How better aesthetics in hospitals can make for happier—and healthier—patients by Virginia Postrel

clipped from www.theatlantic.com But why assume good medicine must come with bad design? Most hotel guests care more about reliable reservations than about crisp duvet covers. That doesn’t mean they want ugly rooms, though. Given the choice, they’ll go for the hotel that offers the best of both. When Starwood Hotels, which owns the Westin, Sheraton, and W brands, upgraded its rooms in the late 1990s, the rest of the hotel industry followed. Under similar competitive pressure, medical facilities react the same way. When Baby Boomer women started choosing hotel-like birthing centers over hospital delivery rooms, hospitals quickly wised up. Now even rural hospitals offer well-designed labor-delivery-recovery suites. “People do shop, and they will actually sometimes change an obstetrician because they want a certain hospital experience,” says Malkin. Much of the time, however, patients don’t know they can do better.

Red Army Choir Does Lynyrd Skynyrd

From Nellie Durand (wife of double-whammy greatest living Elvis and Brett Farve fan)...

clipped from blog.wired.com What do you get when you take a Finnish rock group that calls itself Leningrad Cowboys, back them up with the Red Army Choir, and put them in front of a stadium full of screaming Russian teenagers to sing Lynyrd Skynyrd's Sweet Home Alabama? Thanks to this YouTube clip (via Russia Blog), the answer to that burning question is now just a click away.

Apple developing full-fledged digital lifestyle fitness companion

Link via Mark Ott:

clipped from www.appleinsider.com A series of patent filings discovered by AppleInsider this week provides an overview of four distinct components that will comprise the system, including an iTunes-like software application, hardware-based heart rate and physiological sensors, a rewards tracker, and a component to facilitate synchronous group activities. "The lifestyle companion system also can interview the user about non-health related topics, e.g., spirituality/religion, identity (e.g., sense of belonging), relationships, career, financial condition, environment, hobbies, interests, other personal information, and goals regarding the same," Apple wrote in one of the filings.

Podcast for Christopher Fuller @ VizThink

Using Design Visuals To Communicate Ideas: A Podcast from Vizthink '08 by Jeff Parks

clipped from www.boxesandarrows.com In late January I had the pleasure of attending the VizThink conference in San Francisco. As an Information Architect I wanted to learn how to use different ideas around design to assist me with “big IA” and “little IA” projects. The folks kind enough to join me in this conversation include: Christopher Fuller Griot’s Eye Daniel Rose Bell Canada Ken and Rebecca Hope Motive8 Infographics Noah Iliinsky Complex Diagrams Listen to podcast >>

The Wisdom of Designing Cradle to Cradle

Gavin Blake in Australia, suggests viewing this video from TED 2005. William McDough quotes Kevin Kelly, "There is no end game, there is only The Infinite Game."

Architect and designer William McDonough asks what our buildings and products would look like if designers took into account "All children, all species, for all time." A tireless proponent of absolute sustainability (with a deadpan sense of humor), he explains his philosophy of "cradle to cradle" design, which bridge the needs of ecology and economics. He also shares some of his most inspiring work, including the world's largest green roof (at the Ford plant in Dearborn, Michigan), and the entire sustainable cities he's designing in China.

SXSW Interactive 2008 Sketchnotes

Rohdesign is the site of designer Mike Rohde, who writes about design, sketching, writing, mobile computing, technology, travel, cycling, books, music and more.

via Lee Potts of Visual Being.

clipped from www.rohdesign.com SXSW Interactive 2008 Sketchnotes are up! I've just completed scanning, tuning and uploading 34 pages of sketchnotes I captured in my pocket Moleskine sketchbook at SXSW Interactive earlier this week. With the SEED Conference sketchnotes being pretty popular, I'm curious to see how these SXSW sketchnotes are received. While sketchnotes capture concentrated concepts for each session well, I think they're even better at awakening ideas stored in the minds of session attendees. Speakers Featured Here are the speakers featured in the SXSW Interactive Sketchnotes: Naz Hamid, Veronica Belmont, Casey McKinnon, Ryan King, Glenda Bautista, Ariel Waldman, John Gruber, Michael Lopp, Jim Coudal, Dan Rubin, Didier Hilhorst, Eris Stassi, Lea Alcantara (sorry for the Leah misspell in the notes!), Ben Brown and Frank Warren.

Heaven on HEMA

Have fun shopping at this crazy on-line store from the Netherlands. If only strolling the aisles of Target were so exciting!

Thanks to Nellie Durand!

Sons Of Lwala: A Documentary of Hope

Milton and Fred Ochieng’ are two brothers from Kenya whose village sent them to America to become doctors. But after losing both parents to AIDS they are left with a heartbreaking task: to return home and finish the health clinic their father started before getting sick.

Unable to raise enough money on their own, the brothers are joined by students, politicians, and a rock band who launch a fund raising drive among young people across the United States. Sons of Lwala follows Milton and Fred on their incredible journey as they find a way, despite all odds, to open their village’s first hospital.

From Project Sunshine:

Amid all the stories that have hit the news about Kenya in the recent weeks, the story of the sons of Lwala has to be told, and what a better way to tell this story than through a film. So, for those of you in the Nashville, TN area or in front of a computer, you are welcome to donate and/or buy tickets for a benefit screening of the story of the two young doctors who returned to Lwala to build a hospital after being educated in the United States

How To Take Action

After Fred and Milton completed the hospital, with the help of well wishers and friends, they realised that they needed to keep it open, and created the Lwala Community Alliance to continue funding the initial donation.

Filmmaker Barry Simmons says via the team’s Facebook page:

It’s time (finally!) to celebrate the completion of our little documentary, and more importantly, to gather around Milton and Fred for a blow-out night at TPAC to raise money for their clinic in Lwala! The screening will be in Nashville on Thursday, March 27. Order tickets at www.tpac.org/lwala.

And just in case you are wondering what your donation will do:

So folks, you can watch the trailer here or the trailer below.

Stamen Design: Information Visualization is a Medium

A jet-lagged Regine Debatty of Worldchanging.com writes from etech08 in San Diego.

She describes her excitement listening to Eric Rodenbeck, founder and creative director of Stamen Design, talk on Information Visualization is a Medium.

clipped from www.worldchanging.com Worldchanging readers may already be familiar with the work of Stamen, especially with the visualizations they created for Digg.com (Swarm and Stack) or the brilliant cabspotting, which Alex wrote about here a while ago. The focus of the talk was on process of analysis and how the concept works both for Stamen and culturally. For Stamen Information visualization is a medium, not a technique per se. The first project that illustrated this statement is Trulia Insight, a real estate aggregator, search and information tool they developed for Trulia, a real estate company based in San Francisco which aggregates information about properties around the United States. The mashup combines historical real estate data with a "heat map" that displays which properties are hot. People looking for a house can search for real estate by zip code, or other parameters like size, cost, and building type. Houses glow different colors as they are built and re-built over the years,

On Your Feet: Can Executives Learn to Ignore the Script?

Gary Hirsch in the Portland, Ore., office of On Your Feet, which he helped found. His consulting firm (a self-proclaimed "miniscule multi-national") helps employees loosen up and make “cool mistakes.”

clipped from www.nytimes.com By JANET RAE-DUPREE Published: March 2, 2008 MANAGERS striving to foster creativity often use the time-worn phrase “thinking outside the box” to encourage workers to come up with something nobody else in the room is thinking. But the improvisational actress Patricia Ryan Madson has a better idea: Look inside the box and take a fresh look at what’s already there. The author of “Improv Wisdom: Don’t Prepare, Just Show Up,” Ms. Madson helps organizations find new ways to play off one another in an unscripted romp toward what might be. Turning the planning process inside out, she says, is an important part of learning how best to “ready, fire, aim.” “We’re all creators given the conditions and permission to do so,” she says. “All too often, there are corporate cultures that say: ‘Be creative, but don’t make any mistakes.’ Improv opens doors to doing things a different way.”

In workshops and seminars, improv consultants pull stodgy executives to their feet, creating novel situations to which they must react, encouraging them to move their bodies, jump, say wild things, clap or sing or dance, play with toys, sit on desks, crawl on the floor and generally provide crazy-seeming new points of view. Tension melts away. Competition takes a back seat. And new ideas miraculously start to flow.

That’s not to say that every business brainstorming session should turn into a stand-up comedy skit. But the openness and playfulness that characterize improvisational acting can create a sense of cooperation and affirmation that is foreign to highly competitive workplaces. When one worker actively shoots down another’s ideas to help his or her own ideas win, nascent notions that could develop into something brilliant die on the vine.

Instead, Ms. Madson and other improv consultants, including a team out of Portland, Ore., called On Your Feet, are hoping to create what Ms. Madson calls “a culture of ‘yes.’ ”

“Saying yes sounds implicit, but it’s profound,” she says. Barriers go up in front of fresh ideas within moments of their creation, leading to an atmosphere of “we can’t do that,” she says. “The improv idea of saying yes from the start,” she adds, “allows business folks to entertain things that would ordinarily get axed out.”

Ms. Madson has been a senior lecturer in drama at Stanford since 1977; her interest in using improvisation to improve business and education evolved slowly. Brilliant as they were, Stanford students were very good at giving what they perceived as the correct answer to a question, but became much shakier when asked to come up with original answers.

Too often, the student mind — not to mention the business mind — is looking for a formula to latch onto that will provide tried-and-true ways of solving problems. But that can block fresh ways of viewing a situation.

Ms. Madson found that teaching students to respond quickly to what’s already in front of them helped to shake new ideas loose. “Certainly it’s useful for actors,” she notes. “But executives and engineers and people in transition are looking for support in saying yes to their own voice. Often, the systems we put in place to keep us secure are keeping us from our more creative selves.”

Improvisational thinking can open the door to what others call “happy accidents.” There are many examples. The molecule that eventually became Viagra originally was developed to treat hypertension, and later angina. When it failed to do much for either of those conditions, Pfizer nearly killed it. But researchers intrigued by the molecule’s side effects ultimately won permission to continue developing the drug as a treatment for erectile dysfunction.

Even On Your Feet is a result of a spontaneous “happy mistake,” its founders note. “On a wet November Saturday in 1996,” they say on its Web site at www.oyf.com, “two unsuspecting bald guys with glasses met at a bakery in Portland, Oregon, to talk about a T-shirt and instead, by complete accident, formed a consultancy that uses improvisation and other experiential techniques to help organizations create, relate and communicate, all while having a ridiculously good time.”

The firm now employs the talents of “an ex ad planner, an anthropologist, two yoga teachers, a handful of improvisers, marketing executives, a snow cone baron and a former mail carrier/biochemist.” They live in places as varied as Portland, London, Dublin and El Hornillo, Spain.

Robert Poynton, a co-founder, says in an upcoming book that everything from building a house to double-entry bookkeeping requires a generous dollop of spontaneous action to be successful. “For all its accomplishments, indeed, perhaps because of them, the modern world is far from stable,” Mr. Poynton says in an online excerpt from the book, titled “A Turtle and a Guitar Case: Improvisation and the Joys of Uncertainty.” “If anything,” he says, “we know rather less about what is coming next, and how it will affect us, than our ancestors did.”

And so the more spontaneously we respond — the more improvisational we are — the more likely we are to stumble across new and improved methods for resolving problems.

The On Your Feet site tells the story of what it calls a “cool mistake”: “Josephine Dickson married a man who worked for a company that manufactured gauze and adhesive tape. Josephine Dickson was accident-prone. During the first week that she was married to Earle Dickson, she cut herself twice with the kitchen knife. After that, it just went from bad to worse. It seemed that Josephine was always cutting herself. One day her husband had an idea. He sat down with some tape and gauze and a pair of scissors. Then he cut the tape into strips. In the middle of each strip he stuck a little square of gauze. Hence the birth of Band-Aids.”

Even the best-planned businesses can fail, Ms. Madson notes. Improvisers avoid spinning their wheels because they see quickly what isn’t working or, simultaneously, what might be successful that didn’t occur to them at first. Improvisers, by definition, take risks and make mistakes, lots of them, but that’s what leads them in fresh directions.

She acknowledges that it can be hard to wrap the business mind around improv, because improvisers don’t dwell on the future. “The future takes care of itself if we’re building constructively right now,” she says. “You’re throwing out planning as the primary mode of work, but it doesn’t mean you don’t then use known strategies and systems to move forward.”

Mike Kwatinetz, a venture capitalist who is co-founder and general partner at Azure Capital Partners in Palo Alto, Calif., says he believes that improvisational thinking gets new companies rolling in the right direction. “For these young companies, and hopefully forever, you want to have changes all the time,” Mr. Kwatinetz said. “You want to be reacting to what you’re seeing and what you’re doing right and where it’s not working and react to that to try something different.”

Besides, he says, “if you’re working at a job as intensely as we do, you’d better be enjoying yourself.”

Janet Rae-Dupree writes about science and emerging technology in Silicon Valley.