At NextGen:Health, top innovators in healthcare will bring game-changing ideas to the forefront of the industry. The first day of the conference includes a series of short, engaging talks on everything from increasing patient well-being, to improving the experiences of the doctors and patients, to enabling better research and data sharing.

Sonin will be joining other notable speakers including Dr. Nicholas F. LaRusso, Director of the Center for Innovation at Mayo Clinic and Dr. Jay Parkinson of HelloHealth. Sonin will be presenting on the topic “Hacking Health: Designing for and Understanding Your Health”.

“We’re excited to have Juhan speaking about designing your health at the NextGen:Health conference. His talks are inspiring and entertaining and I can’t wait to see what he has in store for us this year,” said Andrew Zimmerman, MD, co-founder of NextGen:Health.

Sonin is a nationally recognized expert in design for health and wellness. In addition to leading the HIMSS Mobile Health Design Workgroup, he has also provided consultation for the US Dept of Health and Human Services on the design of Medicare.gov and national health IDs, and co-designed Project Laika, the open source data interoperability service used in CCHIT’s EHR certification.

“I’m looking forward to speaking at NextGen:Health and honored to be part of the event,” Sonin said. “Some of the most influential and innovative thinkers in the field will be participating in the conference. As citizens of this country, and of the world, we’re really obligated to take a serious look at the way health and healthcare are provided and consumed. Understanding your own health and being able to design the experience to best serve your specific needs, is critical to providing people with better outcomes.”

The conference is set for March 29-30, 2012 in New York City at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center. For more information please visit www.nextgenhealth.com.

About Involution Studios


Involution designs and builds exceptional apps for innovative and visionary companies. We deploy small and experienced teams to create software that is highly usable and appropriately beautiful. Our client list includes Apple, AstraZeneca, McAfee, Microsoft, Oracle, PayPal, Shutterfly, and Yahoo. For more information please contact info@goinvo.com or +1 617 803 7043.

People’s attitudes towards software are changing, as are their expectations about how it should work. It is commonly accepted that our day-to-day reality is infused with the digital, and this connected lifestyle has reached far beyond the world of knowledge workers and other geeks. This is a seismic shift in our total cultural conception of computing.

Software is part of the continuous thread of our lives now, and more and more, the user interface defines how we interact. Software’s ascendency in the public mind is clearly reflected in, of all things, our television advertisements, which gives us a view of the digital zeitgeist. Aside from the many advertisements for the iPhone, iPad, and various Android devices that dominate the airwaves, there is more interesting and telling evidence. One example in particular can be found in the television ads of two financial services companies, who, in a fist fight for new accounts, have turned, not to a celebrity or executive spokesperson to entice stock traders to register for their system but to the user interface of their trading software. Both Fidelity and E*trade have recently promoted their professional style trading systems with ads touting the quick response, ease of use, and information visualization capabilities of their platforms. In these ads, the narrator is secondary to the sleek curves of the UI chrome and the flowing lines of the live charts and graphs.

But strangely enough, it’s this Michelob commercial that illustrates just how deeply computer interactions have embedded themselves into our consciousness. In the advertisement, a man goes through the activities of his day, using the gestures normally associated with a tablet interface to move items, transform his surroundings, and generally improve his life. While I’ve never tried gesturing with my hand in the hopes that I could magically move objects out of the way, there are many times I’ve caught myself half expecting an “undo” option in the real world.

As digital products continue to grow in popularity, and ease of use, beauty, and usefulness have become increasingly important, the software user interface has become the key element and product differentiator. The sophistication of the average consumer is growing, and in this new understanding of software the user interface is the hero. For digital product designers, then, our opportunities are many, but our work is definitely cut out for us.

SOPA: Anatomy of a Public Uprising
As most of us of are aware, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) bill in the US House of Representatives, while purported to protect content providers, in fact hides within its depths the chilling ability to freeze online businesses and tech innovation through a set of draconian provisions, that would, for instance, force search engines to filter their search results.

Last week, as the technorati voiced their dissent and decorated their avatars with black bands reading “Stop SOPA”, Representatives began taking notice. In the open forum of the Internet, people circumvented the Washington lobbying of pro-SOPA industries, and voiced their extreme displeasure.

The political situation reached an inflection point on Thursday, when legislators began to backpedal on their support for the bill as they saw public opposition rising.

Then the White House weighed in with a statement against the bill in its current form. In response, the House of Representatives shelved the bill, at least for the time being.

Talk about the bill’s demise is greatly exaggerated however, as it could be reopened again. Adding to the fear of a zombie SOPA resurrecting itself is the fact that its equally malformed Senate twin PIPA is still lurching forward.

Leave Me Alone, I’m Being Creative
Is the future of creative work a collective endeavor? The New York Times featured an interesting piece in their SundayReview opinion pages on “The Rise of Groupthink” and how open office plans, constant collaboration, and group brainstorming may not be the everything it’s cracked up to be when it comes to drawing out creativity and innovative thinking in a business environment. In addition to dissecting the current trends towards a more collaborative work environment, the article also explores explores the introverted nature of creative types, and asks whether the new focus on the group is supportive of the lone genius. In a related article, Business Insider takes a look at “How Larry Page Changed Meetings At Google …” to align them with better decision making. Not surprisingly, Larry limited the number of people in the group, and required a decision maker to be at all meetings.

Where the Wild Things Are
As our cities grow bigger and bigger, natural wildlife is getting squeezed out at every turn. One architecture firm from the Netherlands thinks it has a solution to providing sanctuary for the displaced plants and animals: Sea Trees, or floating wildlife oases.

Job Innovation at Lightspeed
There’s no question that the days of the long-term job are long past. In today’s volatile, technology injected, rapidly shifting economy, how can we expect to know what jobs will be around in the next five years, let alone the next ten? Fast Company takes a look at the new skill sets required for the new world of “quicksilver” work.

FTC Fires Back at Google+
As Google attempts to leverage its massive search traffic to give Google+ an edge in the burgeoning social network wars, the FTC is firing back, by expanding its antitrust investigation to include Google+. With such a juicy prize as social network dominance at stake, it’s no wonder we’re seeing a no holds barred approach from the search giant.

First, we’re excited to announce the debut of our Design Axioms card deck, which encapsulates essential software design wisdom from industry luminaries including Andrei Herasimchuk, Luke Wroblewski, Dirk Knemeyer, and Juhan Sonin. The initial deck, which includes 21 beautiful cards illustrated by Sarah Kaiser, provides a simple but powerful reference set to inspire and excite UI designers and engineers. Perfect for use during brainstorming sessions, design critiques, or as a day-to-day reference, Design Axioms is the fun gift that UI and UX practitioners will want to give themselves. It is not only a fantastic design education, but a piece of artwork as well. The Design Axioms deck is the culmination of a decade of work by Juhan Sonin, who, working with some of the finest software organizations on the planet, has compiled key tenets to design by. Best of all, the content is open source and ready for anyone to creatively remix. The first Design Axioms card deck will ship in April, 2012.

The Design Axioms set of 21 cards will be available in April, 2012.

The Design Axioms cards combine software design wisdom with beautiful illustrations.

On the client side of our practice, we’re working on, or have recently completed significant software projects for Alcatel-Lucent, BMC, CodeRyte, Crossover Health, and Segterra in the healthcare, IT systems management, and security fields.

As the healthcare software space heats up, Involution is at the forefront. For Crossover Health, we’re designing a mobile application to record, manage, and review healthcare data for on campus employee clinics at Fortune 100 companies.

hGraph, the core of the Crossover Health mobile app, provides a visual depiction of a user’s total health.

For Segterra, Involution recently designed the UI for SegPlan, a Web application which leverages a unique blood analysis methodology to provide the user with a highly-targeted, scientifically-based fitness plan composed of diet, nutrition, and exercise, optimized for that person’s body.

The SegPlan Web app provides targeted recommendations based on blood analysis.

And for CodeRyte we’re designing and producing a health insurance coding system which will handle billions of dollars in revenue for major hospital systems in the United States. CodeRyte’s sophisticated natural language processing technology streamlines the healthcare insurance coding process and identifies clinically relevant information about medical records.

All in all, it looks to be a great year coming in 2012 for Involution Studios. We’re excited to embark on the journey.

“We’re excited to have Juhan talk on mobile software design in health at the HIMSS12 conference. He’s been a driving force behind the HIMSS Mobile Design workgroup for the past 2 years, collaborating on national design guidelines for healthcare mobile applications.” said Edna Boone, Senior Director Mobile Initiatives for HIMSS.

Sonin is a recognized expert in design for health and wellness, providing consultation to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

“It is an honor to speak at HIMSS12,” Sonin said. “Information technology is critical to transforming our healthcare system and providing people with better outcomes. Some of the best minds in the field will be speaking at and attending the conference.”

The conference is set for February 20 – 24, 2012 in Las Vegas, Nevada at the Venetian Sands Expo Center. For more information please visit www.himssconference.org.

About Involution Studios

Involution designs and builds exceptional apps for innovative and visionary companies. We deploy small and experienced teams to create software that is highly usable and appropriately beautiful. Our client list includes Apple, AstraZeneca, McAfee, Microsoft, Oracle, PayPal, Shutterfly, and Yahoo. For more information please contact info@goinvo.com or +1 617 803 7043.

If You Make Sure You’re Kinected, the Xbox is on the Wall
Last week, Microsoft’s Kinect turned one year old, and the Redmond giant celebrated the “Kinect Effect” with a video highlighting future applications of the technology from healthcare to music to education.

Released in November 2010, and originally intended for use primarily in gaming and entertainment as part of the Xbox platform competition with Nintendo’s groundbreaking Wii, the Kinect’s advanced gesture, facial, and voice recognition features were soon hacked for a variety of purposes ranging from creating art to assisting the disabled.

Microsoft knows it has a good thing going and has accepted and even embraced the alternate uses of the Kinect. The Microsoft Kinect Effect Web site is chronicling new and inventive ways the technology is being implemented.

Playing Laptop Music
Audio production moved from analog tape systems to the convenience of digital long ago with the advent of ProTools software and other audio editing suites. For creating live music in a spontaneous and active way, however, the bits and bytes have always lagged a little. This isn’t to say that performers haven’t incorporated computer generated sounds and tracks into their live performances … far from it. But the computerized track has always lacked the instant, live, and personal feedback and flexibility that more traditional instruments are capable of.

Stutter Edit, an innovative piece of software designed by pioneering DJ and producer BT and built by Boston-based iZotope, aims to change all that. Stutter Edit takes live sample manipulation to another level, allowing performers to play effects like an instrument and remix in real time.

DJs and electronic musicians have pushed the envelope when it comes to defining musical instruments, the most obvious example being the turntable, which has evolved from a machine for audio playback to an expressive tool used with technique and artistry. Laptops and touch screen devices are the new frontier for digital music. Expect to see more software innovation on the way, if the BT and iZotope collaboration is any indication of what’s possible when musicians and tech get together.

Come Together, Right Now: Design is Integration
The concept of total system design is gaining traction in the business world. The idea that design can be an integrative method, bringing together engineering, business, and users, while a familiar meme to the UX and software communities is still a relatively fresh way to look at problem sets in the larger world of corporate thinking.

Design blog Thought You Should See This, provides a great summation of GE CMO Beth Comstock’s talk at the Design at Scale conference.

In the presentation, Comstock describes the company’s overall process and how design fits in. “At an engineering-focused company like GE, the tech teams and engineers rule. ‘They push the limits of science every day,’ she said. What they need, however, is the ability to pull all the various pieces and insights together and this, she averred, is a role for design.”

Designing the Supply Chain
One of the unheralded but critical business innovations at Apple over the past decade, is the company’s design, creation, and management of a highly optimized supply chain.

A revealing Bloomberg Businessweek article explains how Apple has effectively hamstrung competitors like HP and HTC year after year by locking down everything from air freight delivery to critical parts like touchscreens, months in advance. Gartner has rated Apple’s supply chain as the world’s best for four years in a row.

Apple’s business excellence and design focus apparently doesn’t just extend to its products, but to all of the systems that make up the company. Design thinking may be much maligned as a buzz word lacking substance, but here we can see where the active, creative problem solving for business systems has reaped substantial rewards.

Get Up and Get Fit
The evolution of body and skin top fitness devices took another step this month as mobile products company Jawbone released the Up wristband which works with an iPhone app to track everything from your sleep cycles to your physical activity.

Competing with the Fitbit clip on sensor and the BodyMedia FIT, the Jawbone Up seems to have at least one major advantage, it’s water resistant. So, you can wear it while you’re in the shower. Personally, I’d love to have one of these devices that I could wear while swimming. Maybe that will come in Jawbone Up version 2.

In one of the more infamous stories to come out of the collapse, apparently three of the Red Sox starting pitchers decided to eat fried chicken and drink beer in the clubhouse during games, when they should have been sitting in the dugout supporting their team mates. Rather than showing leadership, Lackey, Beckett, and Lester were self-involved and selfish, fine examples of people you would never want on your team. And the Red Sox paid the price.

We can’t draw a direct line from the antics of professional athletes to the attitudes of knowledge workers, and it would be a mistake to try. But as software designers and engineers we are part of a well-paid, in demand profession that is shaping the future of American business. With that in mind, one of the least appreciated factors in assessing software design projects, the talent required for them, and the structure needed for them to function smoothly and ultimately succeed, is how much or how little the individuals on the project are team players.

Genius Over All
In the digital technology industry, we’re currently experiencing a dearth of qualified engineers and UX designers. In this war for talent, we’re too often searching for the rock star candidates, focusing solely on the hard skill set. The soft skills that make a person a great team player may not be much of a priority. The stereotype here is that of the genius engineer or designer who can solve problems all on their own. And it is within this genius framework that assessors of technical ability debate whether one great engineer is worth 5 or even 50 average engineers.

Team orientation, then, is a key ingredient that’s often overlooked by technology project managers and leaders. Why is this? For starters, while it sounds like an obvious personal attribute, it can be extremely difficult to assess. Team orientation is actually an amalgam of many different soft traits. For software UI designers, this can be any combination of flexibility, tenacity, dedication, communication, and self-awareness. During a job interview, we can guess at a person’s ability to integrate well into a existing culture or their willingness to go the extra mile to meet a deadline, but we can’t know for sure until we work with them. If we’re looking for the rock star applicant we might very well miss the person who’s not quite as flashy, but makes everyone around them better.

Free Agent Nation
Of course, the hiring path is a two way street. And, if tech companies are looking for rock stars, workers are trying just as hard to be that unique talent. For knowledge workers, then, the ability to switch jobs easily, and work wherever we want, whenever we want is freeing, but also destabilizing. We increasingly orient our careers around ourselves alone, and a cynical observer would say that we’re a generation of natural mercenaries. Why shouldn’t we be? In an economy where corporations are seemingly loyal to no one, why shouldn’t a creative class worker operate as a company of one? So, is this the best we can do? Is the team dead?

Innovation and the Swarm
Here’s just one example of how teamwork helps improve design. At Involution we run a studio model, which means that every designer has access to critiques and advice from every other designer in the shop. For projects requiring a lot of good ideas rapidly, we may overload the job with a swarm of designers, who will work together intensively for a few days or even a whole week, sketching, iterating, and generally feeding off of each others’ ideas.

To iterate and eventually innovate in a studio atmosphere requires a certain amount of selflessness. You learn to let go of personal attachments and focus solely on the quality of the ideas. It’s hard for designers to separate themselves from their work. It’s only natural to be attached to your creation … after all you thought of it, didn’t you? Ultimately, however, it’s this willingness to serve the project or product team that not only improves the quality of work, but enables the collaborative process to happen, whether we’re working with colleagues, stakeholders, users, or clients.

Leadership is Serving
If we believe that teamwork is critical to good software design, then we can ask ourselves: Did I pull my weight today? How can I improve and support my team better? How can we all work together more productively and effectively? On the flip side, if we act like those Red Sox starting pitchers, we’ll never create, innovate, and push this economy forward. As software professionals it is our responsibility is to produce great work, and remember that leadership and teamwork is indeed about serving.

As Robert Fabricant eloquently wrote in a recent Fast Company article, Apple achieved the pinnacle of design as represented by past forms. Their use of analog metaphors and comfortable affordances at the highest possible level of design craft allowed us to explode into the digital age. This is, in some real way, Steve Jobs’ legacy.

The industrial age is wheezing toward a diseased conclusion. Already, the preponderance of industrial jobs have moved from the west into developing countries. More than that, if the majority of world scientists are to be believed, the residue of the industrial age is threatens our oceans, our ecosystem, our species, and perhaps even our world. The end of that paradigm appears to be coming from both directions: the evolutionary progress beyond creating, hoarding and discarding physical crap, coupled with the devolutionary process of our having created a technological and physical infrastructure that destroys our natural world.

The advances of Apple under Steve Jobs serve as perhaps the ultimate icon of transition: the pinnacle of creation in our dying paradigm, and a shape of things to come in the future we have yet to experience. However, as Fabricant pointed out, as magical as iPads and iPods and even Apple IIe’s of 25 years ago might have seemed, their greatest successes came dressed in the metaphors of past technologies and affordances, things that are part of a world within which their influence and even presence is rapidly diminishing.

Where the visionary and innovative spirit of Steve Jobs can now take those of us who have the foresight, ability and courage enough to pioneer them is toward new forms for and definitions of design and beauty. No one will yoke the modern and futuristic digital life so successfully to the analog past as Steve Jobs’ Apple. At some granular level, you could even say that is his design legacy. But we can now break out from that warm comfort. We can discover and create new, fresh, unexpected ways to bridge the gap between the world we’re going to create and the people who will experience it.

Ever since reading Fabricant’s essay and realizing the true lack of creativity and originality in our culture in general and Apple’s design strategy in particular, I’ve resolved myself to pursue such an agenda. Perhaps with the even larger event of Jobs’ death we can contextualize this moment in time and together aspire to so much more than even Jobs himself was ultimately doing, in the process carrying the spirit which led him to such audacious heights still forward.

For Immediate Release
ARLINGTON, MA (U.S.) – September 22, 2011 – Erik Dahl joined Involution Studios this week as Director of Design Strategy. Based in Columbus, Ohio, Dahl will spearhead development of Involution’s Design Strategy and Research practices as well as leading the growth and development of a Columbus studio.

“Erik is an expert in design strategy and research,” said Juhan Sonin, principal and Creative Director of Involution. “Not only will his knowledge and experience uplevel our strategic practice and services, his passion for making and big thinking aligns with our design philosophy and practice.”

Most recently Dahl was User Experience Director at Lextant, a leading design research firm in Columbus, Ohio. He has previously held design and research positions including at MAYA Design, the legendary design consultancy and technology research lab that developed out of Carnegie Mellon University.

Dahl is active in design community organization and thought leadership, including serving as a Columbus leader for the Interaction Design Association (IxDA) and a co-organizer of the Midwest UX Conference. He graduated from the University of Michigan with an MS in Human Computer Interactions and a BA in Cultural Anthropology and Philosophy from Centre College.

“Erik’s joining Involution signals our commitment to engaging our customers at an increasingly strategic level, as well as supporting our ongoing geographic expansion,” said Dirk Knemeyer, Founder of Involution. “He is an uncommon talent and his skills and perspective will be of immeasurable value to our clients.”

About Involution Studios
Involution designs and builds exceptional apps for innovative and visionary companies. We deploy small and experienced teams to create software that is highly usable and appropriately beautiful. Our client list includes Apple, AstraZeneca, McAfee, Microsoft, Oracle, PayPal, Shutterfly, and Yahoo.

For more information please contact info@goinvo.com or +1 617 803 7043.

Software allows us to extend our reach even further than we did before, automating processes, accelerating the rate of change, and providing the sinews between people and data. It seems only natural then, that software has come to the forefront of business technology. In this new age, the underlying workflows of businesses as varied as engineering, marketing, accounting, logistics, and entertainment can all be realized as software. In his piece, Andreessen outlines the companies that he sees as dominating their market segments in some of these industries, including LinkedIn, Amazon.com, Netflix, Google, etc. In so doing he highlights the most popular and prominent of the pack.

But, to me what’s most interesting are the segments that draw less hype but are no less critical: security, data center management, business analytics and intelligence. The list of business to businesses software categories and applications goes on and on. In so many sectors, great software is not only becoming necessary to compete, but may be needed to even survive. Not so far in the future, your business may very well be defined by the choices it makes regarding software. More so than at any time in the past, software truly is strategic. Businesses house terabytes, even petabytes of data, information on customers, on products, on infrastructure, on finances, you name it; that needs to be accessed, reviewed, and analyzed.

Now imagine that every business in the future will rely on software, whether off-the-shelf or proprietary, in the cloud or on the desktop, on a mobile device or embedded in a physical system. With this in mind, you can see why there is such a need for engineering and UX talent now. It’s clear that we have too few people who can do these types of jobs. Software designers and engineers with experience creating complicated workflows, dealing with big data, are few. The new age of software is upon us, as Andreessen puts it, “In short, software is eating the world.” Now it’s up to us to go build it.