The PopTech Blog

While on the plane ride down yesterday to the SXSW Festival in Austin, I was flipping through the February issue of Fast Company and came across an article that put a huge smile on my face. It was a visual representation of what the future of design would be for hospitals—hospital 2.0 you could call it.

The hospital has been more or less a place where they get one thing done: get people better and get them home. But this article made me think about hospitals in a new light – part of a collaborative effort to improve communities as a whole.

In thinking about Public Health 2.0 and next level ways of thinking in the field, I feel it’s important to look at cross-disciplinary collaboration in order to meet the increasing needs of the public’s health and well-being. This includes bringing in the design/UXand green aspects of community building.

Of note: hospitals consume twice as much energy as typical office buildings – they are also making it happen all day, every day! Needless to say, hospitals are huge targets for examining efficiency, and the U.S. Green Building Council is developing LEED for Healthcare. With everything from aesthetics (roof garden, cafeteria) and electronic data (medical records) to user design (waiting room, the views) and energy efficiency (on site power, solar power harnessing), the future is looking brighter for staff and patients alike.

As these ideas go from prototype/concept to reality, I hope this new road of inter-disciplinary inclusion will serve as a catalyst in other areas of health.

Shouts to Golden Section Graphics for the illustration. Read more...

For the past few weeks, along with you, PopTech staff has been reading Connected, the book PopTech 2009 speaker James Fowler co-authored with Nicholas Christakis (find the book on Better World Books or through an independent bookseller on Indie Bound).

Tell us: what did you find curious, alarming, or fascinating in Connected?

Please leave your questions for James in the comments, and let us know some of the parts you found especially interesting.

Four things I found particularly relevant:

- Some of the research in the book is becoming known as the “your-friends’-friends-can-make-you-fat” effect; this indirect influence is called hyperdyadic spread.

- We have heard, thought, and considered exhaustively the success of Barack Obama’s political campaign; the twist in chapter six of Connected:

Obama’s campaign was a historical milestone in all kinds of ways, but the most revolutionary way may not have been its fund-raising. Many have commented on Obama’s remarkable ability to connect with voters, but even more impressive was his ability to connect voters to each other.

- In chapter nine we learn that social networks are self-annealing. “They can close up around their gaps, in the same way that the edges of a wound come together.”

- The final pages return to the underlying overall theme, that networks facilitate contagion as well as altruism, but that’s not to say networks accelerate charity or even, perhaps, microdonations without befriending the group or individual; “We would rather give a gift to a friend who will never repay us than to give a gift to a stranger who will.”

Here is James’s talk at PopTech 2009:

and an update from James in February 2010 about the danger of not thinking of ourselves within networks:

Please leave questions and thoughts in the comments below.

Know a great book we should read together in 2010? Drop us a recommendation: hello [at] poptech [dot] org

Yesterday, artist and computer programmer Zach Lieberman came by the PopTech Brooklyn office—it’s actually right down the hall from his working space—to tell us what projects he’s worked on recently.

Last October, Zach spoke at PopTech about his EyeWriter Initiative, “a low-cost eye-tracking apparatus & custom software that allows graffiti writers and artists with paralysis resulting from Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis to draw using only their eyes.”

Look for Zach’s PopTech talk next week; for now, more on his recent travels and inspirations:

Zach will be speaking at SxSW this Saturday morning on a panel (details) about openFrameworks, an open-source c++ library “designed to assist the creative process by providing a simple and intuitive framework for experimentation.”

I’ll be at the Interactive part of SxSW this weekend (do @poptech or leave a comment if you’d like to meet up and talk about PopTech) attending panels on the SWSX Greater Good Programming track.

Can you think of other ways to use Zach’s technologies? What are some of your recent inspirations?

During PopTech 2009, I shot an interview with The New York Times scent critic Chandler Burr about his PopTech 2009 “scent dinner,” where he collaborated with Executive Chef Lawrence Klang at Natalie’s Restaurant in Camden, Maine. For each course, Chef Klang created in taste and flavors what Chandler created in scents:

Chandler told me that he has fallen in love with culinary perfumes, a category of scents little known in the U.S., which are either conceptually food – for example, a perfume that smells of salt – or perfumes made with food raw materials – such as peruvian pink peppercorns or crushed sugarcane used in the rum-making process.

This led him to his scent dinners – a delicious and educational experience that actually consists of two parallel dinners – one olfactory, the other edible.

Kudos to Camden-based David Berez at Post Office Editorial for his smart editing, Scott Buffrey for audio sweetening, Daniel Stephens for his artful shooting, and Mo Kirkham for his patience, even when the audio stopped mid-interview.

Oh, and Chandler’s NYT column is “Scent Notes.”

The 2010 Shorty Awards had some fun with Twitter community conventions on Wednesday night at TheTimesCenter in New York—highlights below include financial celebrity (and Shorty Award Winner) Suze Orman pressing a caller for why he would want to buy Twitter and the serious note that ended the evening, awarding the use of Twitter in Haiti:

What do you think should be rewarded and acknowledged in the Twitter community?