The Internet of Things Will Rise in Boston
With the advent of the mobile revolution, we’re now living connected lives, where our day-to-day activities are closely tied to the digital products and services that we carry with us everywhere on our smart phones. The future vision of smart devices networked via an Internet of Things takes this connectedness one step further, to a place where not only our phones, but our cars, our homes, the appliances within them, and any number of other objects can communicate with each other and us. This connected vision may be closer to reality than we realize.

Boston has long been a hub of both industrial and software design. The Internet of Things, of course, requires that those disciplines work together to produce the amazing new connected devices, generating streams of sensor data that can be controlled, consumed, monitored, and analyzed by software.

In his Innovation Economy blog in the Boston Globe, Scott Kirsner highlights Bolt, a new accelerator / incubator program, with the express mission of fostering businesses built around connected devices, currently looking for space in the Boston and Cambridge area.

One User Experience for All Devices
With the announcement of OS X Mountain Lion last week, Apple has fired the first shot in the universal user experience platform war.

GigaOm has a great article dissecting Apple’s Grand Unified User Experience, the term coined by Jean-Louis Gassée in his analysis of the OS. The essential idea is that no matter what the device — laptop, tablet, or phone — the user experience feels the same, behaves the same, and draws on similar patterns. Mountain Lion, of course, brings UX elements from iOS back to the desktop experience, completing the cycle of OS behavior. With this universal UX, the user can also expect their devices to synchronize, not only data, but workflow. Start a conversation on your iPad in FaceTime and finish it on your Mac laptop. Write a document on the laptop and edit it on the way to work on your iPhone. While some of this is certainly possible now, the new Mountain Lion OS further integrates the separate device experiences to make them seem like they fit together naturally.

It’s easy to see how Apple has upped the ante here for UX. In the coming war then, for a universal user experience, on one side we’ll likely have Google with its Android / Chrome OS, on another Windows / Windows Mobile, and, in the strategically enviable forward position, at least for the moment, of course Apple and OS X / iOS.

Freelance Nation
There’s no question that the combination of work anywhere technology and an unpredictable economy has contributed to an increase in the ranks of Freelance Nation. Time has an interesting piece heralding “The End of the Full Time Salaried Job” that details some of the current trends, while a related article in GigaOm cites a study by MBO Partners predicting 70 million independent workers in the next decade, which would amount to half of all employees. The Atlantic Monthly has called the surge in freelance workers, the “industrial revolution of our time”. The disruption of the time honored employer / employee relationship is here to stay. What happens next, though, is another question entirely. Whether a huge swath of independent workers can not just survive, but thrive over time, without the trappings that come with employment from a single entity — like health and retirement benefits and a steady flow of work — remains to be seen.

Seeding Boston Start Ups
The Boston start up scene got another boost as NextView Ventures inaugural fund recently closed with $21 million in its coffers. NextView Ventures is a seed stage venture capital fund, managed by partners David Beisel, Rob Go, and Lee Hower, that invests solely in internet businesses. A micro VC firm like NextView is right sized for Boston’s early stage companies and fits the needs of a city where start ups are in abundance, but angel funds can be hard to find.

Rethinking Money v. Happiness
A review of Laura Vanderkam’s new book, All the Money in the World: What the Happiest People Know About Getting and Spending, on Fast Company, highlights some of the new realities of work / life balance in a world that blurs the boundaries between the two. Technology has freed us from the cube farm, but it has also tethered us to the always on broadband connection. The economic instability of the past four years has shaken our belief in the steadiness of full-time employment, but has opened us up to the great possibilities of a work / life conceived and designed by ourselves. If you could work on any project, what would it be? As we rethink the assumptions we’ve made about how and why we work, we have a golden opportunity to align our daily grind with what fulfills us. Credit Fast Company for advancing the conversation.

The summit featured two panel discussions, “Crossing the Big Data Chasm”, and “From Hype to Reality” as well as a keynote by IBM VP for Business Analytics Products and Solutions, Deepak Advani. I found the second panel particularly intruiging as technical leaders from Kyruus, Cloundant, EMC Greenplum and DataXu, dove into the nitty gritty problems of building software to handle big data.

As consumers and businesses generate new information at an unprecedented pace, the buzz around big data and its management, storage, processing and analysis, is building to a crescendo. Our lives are becoming increasingly digital, and the consequences of that digitization is a deluge of data from every conceivable source. Social media, the most noticeable example of our new digital lives, creates terabytes of data every day. Every second, there are thousands of credit card transactions around the world. And, according to a recent McKinsey report on “Big data: The next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity”, the US Library of Congress amassed 235 terabytes of data in just one month. Analyst firm IDC predicted in June that over 1.8 zettabytes would be created and replicated in 2011. The often mentioned, three “V”s of Big Data — velocity, volume, variety — essentially boil down to a lot of bits and bytes coming at us fast, from many sources. These terabytes to petabytes to exabytes of data can be extremely difficult, if not impossible to manage with typical database software tools.

In Massachusetts, we have deep university expertise and research at institutions like MIT, established big infrastructure players like Akamai and EMC, data management companies like Netezza (recently purchased by IBM), analytics firms like Crimson Hexagon and startups of all stripes. The MassTLC report “Big Data and Analytics” estimates that there are 100 big data related companies in Massachusetts with an additional 20 in stealth mode.

As a software design firm steeped in big data and analytics, Involution looks forward to contributing to this growing sector in meaningful ways. Our current slate of big data related projects includes software design for health care systems automation with client CodeRyte and infoviz on dektop and mobile platforms for marketing research global leader Survey Sampling International. Past work includes UI and analytics for AstraZeneca, Curl, PTC, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services among others.

Analyzing the impact of energy use and green technology is integral to future business and society. We created this dataviz prototype to help an energy customer envision a powerful new software service.

Curl needed a powerful, data-rich prototype to show off the power of their application technology and asked Involution to conceptualize and design it.

“Juhan is joining a preeminent cadre of industry leaders with diverse backgrounds and experience in cutting edge technology, and we are thrilled that he will be sharing his unique experiences with our attendees,” said Dawna White, Manager, Specialty Education at HIMSS.

At the HIMSS12 conference Sonin will be joining other notable leaders in both tech innovation and healthcare policy including Biz Stone, Donna Brazile, and Dana Perino. In addition to the workshop and expert forum, Sonin will be presenting on the topic “Health Everyware: Making Mobile Health Beautiful and Useful”. 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 be a part of the HIMSS12 conference,” 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 Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS), is the largest U.S. not-for-profit healthcare association focused on providing global leadership for the transformation of health and healthcare through the optimal use of information technology. HIMSS12 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.

“Concept Studio is likely to transform our business in fundamental ways,” said Steve Lamoureux, Chief Innovation Officer of Affinnova.

Concept Studio seamlessly integrates with Affinnova’s optimization platform, IDDEA, that applies the practice of natural selection, as evidenced in biological evolution, to a process of rapidly innovating products and services. IDDEA enables marketing teams to get consumer feedback to a variety of concepts, winnowing out the lesser ones to find the most competitive, top ideas.

“Affinnova’s Concept Studio is a complex application, exactly the type of project we really excel at,” said Juhan Sonin, Creative Director of Involution. “Beginning with our product architecture process, which brought together our design team and Affinnova’s product team, we refined the vision for Concept Studio. The subsequent design process resulted in an elegant, well-crafted application that fully manifested Affinnova’s hopes for its potential.”

Involution not only helped build an initial prototype, but helped iterate on all the various ideas to get the right UI design. Prototypes were very successful with customers and the market. In the end, the completed Concept Studio hit every design requirement Involution insists on: useful, usable and appropriately beautiful. The finished application combines the desirability of well-crafted desktop software with the richness and power of a collaborative, Web distributed application.

Visit the Affinnova Web site for more information on Affinnova and Concept Studio.

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.

Involution Studios was well represented with two of our leadership team speaking. Involution Founder, Dirk Knemeyer examined the complex, cross-disciplinary question of how people understand themselves and each other, in his talk “Understanding Us: The Next Frontier”, which received a write up in Irish tech publication Silicon Republic, and Director of Design Strategy, Erik Dahl discussed a framework for “Cultural Design”.

Understanding Us
While humanity has put men on the moon, mapped the human genome, and found cures for some of the most debilitating diseases, the scientific, organized understanding of human motivation and behavior has largely remained the undiscovered country. Its seems that the essential, internal human condition has been left to wither, while external, physical aspects of the world have been developed almost beyond the limits of our comprehension. Because of this, immense opportunity now lies before us to revolutionize how we understand ourselves and others, and improve the quality of the world and our lives. Knemeyer postulates that the next great frontier of human endeavor is to be found in this knowledge, the use of which will impact us as citizens, designers, and marketers. He argues that interaction designers should be centrally focused on these opportunities and lead this future.

Sketch notes for “Understanding Us” by Eva-Lotta Lamm

The “Understanding Us” talk is a natural extension of the Applied Empathy framework, first published by Knemeyer in September, 2006 as a series of articles for user experience magazine UXmatters. These pieces address how we approach designing for the whole person, in ways that extend beyond the typical UX practice.

Part One: Applying Empathy to Design

Part Two: Dimensions, Needs, and Desires

Part Three: Real-World Applications

A visual depiction of the Applied Empathy framework

Cultural Design
In his presentation on Cultural Design, Erik Dahl contends that as a design profession we need to expand our discourse to include culture and cultural theory into our understanding of interactions, experiences, and design. The products and services we design and deploy are embedded within a culture and not just a context. But culture is an important concept that is often overlooked by designers. We need to think beyond user’s goals, needs, desires, emotions, context, psychology and principles of design and start designing from a place of culture. Ultimately, design (even if data and pattern driven) is subjective and we bring our own historical trajectory to our designs. Having a deeper understanding of culture will have a direct impact on what we bring to our design decisions.

The products and services we design are embedded within a culture

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.