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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.

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.

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.

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.

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,

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.”

clipped from thoughts-illustrated.blogspot.com

WiiMote multitouch from CynergyLabs

Building on Johnny Chung Lee's Wiimote example, CynergyLab in San Diego has created a multitouch prototype using a large screen display and IR emitters built into gloves. I'll bet Nintendo never thought of that!

clipped from unclutterer.com

This week’s Workspace of the Week is Blupics’ two person office:

Now that you’ve been blown away by the first image, check out this one featuring all of the cords, drives, and peripherals attached beautifully to the underside of the desk. Wow!

I share my home office with my husband and we have often spoken about the space we might save if we had a single desk for both of us. Finding this image showed me that a shared, single desk could be a technical and uncluttered possibility. Thank you, Blupic, for showing us all an uncluttered, space-saving, office setup choice. It’s impressive.

clipped from googleblog.blogspot.com

I've suffered major headaches trying to sync all my calendars. I used the Microsoft Outlook calendar on my desktop computer at home, but since I wanted to be able to access my schedule from anywhere, I also kept a copy of it on Google Calendar. When I traveled, I'd import my Google Calendar data into my laptop's Outlook calendar so I could access it offline. This was not only annoying to maintain, but also quite error-prone. If I made updates on any of the copies of my calendar, I had to make sure to make those same exact changes to the other copies, too.

This was my life for a whole year before we started working on Google Calendar Sync, a 2-way synching application between Google Calendar and the calendar in Microsoft Outlook. I was probably the most excited person on the team when we started developing it, because now I can access my calendar at home or on my laptop, on Google Calendar or in Outlook.

clipped from www.43folders.com

NPR: Put Your Money Where Your Girth Is

Merlin Mann writes:

I really enjoyed this Morning Edition story on “Prospect Theory,” or the idea that loss aversion can be an effective motivator in goals related to health improvement like weight loss and smoking cessation:

“What we know about incentives is that people work a lot harder to avoid losing $10 than they will work to gain $10,” explains Ayres. “So something that’s framed as a loss is really effective at changing behavior.”

Related to that question I was asked at Macworld: I wonder if a gym membership might be even more motivating if you received a daily email updating you on the wasted dollars you’d spent by not working out in the last n days.

When I started paying most of my own college tuition, I remember realizing that every class I skipped was equivalent to throwing away about a day and a half of the money I’d earned from waiting on tables. It was very motivating for me, and I started missing a lot fewer classes as a result.

clipped from www.socialedge.org

The movement for an efficient online capital marketplace is gaining attention, momentum and players.  Recently, a variety of organizations including Great Nonprofits, Social Markets, Give Well, Root Cause, and even GuideStar and Google, have taken steps toward solving the enigma of connecting greater donor dollars to the highest performing nonprofits. 

Logic Models and the theories of change have proven useful first steps to help nonprofits to plan.  Beyond planning, nonprofits have struggled to implement their goals; how can we in the social sector measure our performance toward our stated missions in a way that both stimulates our own improvement as well as satisfying the requirements of the grant-maker and donor communities to measure and assess impact?

Foundations have the ability to dictate reporting requirements, but until the sector is able to speak a common language, with a common framework for the outcomes, reporting serves primarily as additional burden. 

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