Plot 47A

Getting a new name

cassiemc — Sat, 18 May 2013 02:44:17 +0000

I needed a new name for this blog once I knew it would no longer be about designing healthcare. “Plot 47a” sounds a bit like a graveyard plot, but it is actually the section of a community garden that my husband and I had when we lived in Surrey a few years ago (our allotment). - Read More -

Brave New World

cassiemc — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 08:04:03 +0000

O wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in’t. —William Shakespeare, The Tempest I’m a little sad, and a little excited, to share that this is my last week working at the Centre for Global eHealth Innovation on the Human Factors team. I’ll - Read More -

Disruptive Incumbent

cassiemc — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 04:35:20 +0000

“You can’t create a disruptive business inside an incumbent business.” Jon Lax wrote an insightful post about a month ago that I haven’t stopped thinking about since. Teehan+Lax have a “zombie product” they named Image Spark, an image collection service similar to Pinterest (but born way earlier). The service, with 90k unique visits, is not exactly dead, yet it is - Read More -

CreativeMornings Toronto: Dave Meslin’s call to designers

cassiemc — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 17:18:41 +0000

“Designers are more powerful than politicians, lawyers, banks – because you can give a voice to relevant issues.” Dave Meslin Dave Meslin, a local civic reformer, spoke at CreativeMornings Toronto last month about redesigning city politics to be more inclusive and participatory. He was awesome: He was a comfortable, informed speaker and during the talk he practiced - Read More -

Don’t kill a crazy idea before it’s been tested

cassiemc — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 07:00:10 +0000

Ideas that are different will challenge the way things have been done before, and they require courage and hard work to see through to the end We love to think that designing is as simple as having an idea, sketching it out, putting it in Photoshop to create assets that can be built out into an - Read More -

Building a Hackathon

cassiemc — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 20:06:29 +0000

I recently reached out to founder Sahadeva Hammari to talk about his tool Collabfinder, which brings people with different skill-sets together to tackle projects, and we ended up having a conversation about starting hackathons. Saha had some questions about my recent experience on the coordination side of Hacking Health, and he was gracious enough to - Read More -

ISO 13485: Healthcare Regulation

cassiemc — Fri, 02 Nov 2012 20:30:03 +0000

Earlier this week at our centre-wide, monthly meeting my colleague Lily Alexander took the opportunity to train us one of the most boring subject-matters that ever existed: ISO 13485. So sorry Lily, but it’s true. What is ISO 13485? From what I understand so far ISO 13485 is the standardized regulations around medical device manufacturing - Read More -

Design Team at Hacking Health

cassiemc — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 22:22:11 +0000

We know design is an important piece of the applications we will be building this weekend at Hacking Health. We also know one of the most crucial aspects of great design is iteration, and that it is difficult to create a well-designed application in a weekend without great feedback. This weekend, we will have a - Read More -

Med 2.0, Sketchnotes and The Embedded Designer

cassiemc — Fri, 21 Sep 2012 02:03:05 +0000

I was so excited to have the opportunity to present some of my thoughts at my very first Medicine 2.0 (held this year at Harvard Medical School) about the culture of healthcare and how that needs to adapt to make room for better design. Five minutes is barely enough time to scratch the surface of - Read More -

Photocopier Experiments

cassiemc — Fri, 29 Jun 2012 22:00:28 +0000

I haven’t had much time lately, but know that many thoughts and posts are brewing and I can’t wait to finish them. Maybe the long weekend will allow me to get ahead of myself? (Happy Canada Day to my local readers!) In the meantime, I wanted to share results from my photocopier experiments during my - Read More -