The power to transcend paradigms: don’t forget to keep yourself unattached in the arena of paradigms.
Preparation for concept development:
Now that you have identified a problem, how will you solve it?
Who will your solution address?
What levers do you need to pull?
The mindset or paradigm out of which the system – its goals, power structure, rules, its culture-arises.
Reading for next week:
Pick any of these architectural “facsicles” - they are delicious.
Assignment for next week to prepare for final concept presentation:
Concept source and exploration:
What part of the system of how we care for bodies, or how we make and maintain our buildings, interests you the most?
What are the anomalies and failures that irk you?
What possibilities do you see?
Most of the technological interventions in the global environment have focused on the supply side:
The availability of land (conservation)
The availability of fuel (gas crises, investment in clean tech)
The availability of greener products with greener materials (green product development/greenwashing)
In this class we focus on the demand side – making buildings so that they demand less from the earth. But to understand the context, we need to know our recent history.
Reading:
Understanding Citizen Science:
http://www.ukeof.org.uk/documents/understanding-citizen-science.pdf
Pages 1-23.
Assignment:
Calculate your carbon footprint.
1. Calculate the carbon footprint of your country:
http://www.carbonfootprintofnations.com/
2. Find a personal carbon footprint calculator that you trust. Prepare a one page/slide view of your footprint. Why did you choose this particular calculator. What were the inputs. What did you learn.
Midterm.
March 11: Guest Lecturer Sara Holoubek
March 18: Spring Break
March 25: Clean Tech Failures, Clean Tech Long Term View
For March 25th:
Reading: Why the Clean Tech Boom Went Bust by Juliet Eilperin, Wired
Assignment: In the same way we reviewed health apps for our first assignment, find an app, website, or some other technology service that gives an end user the ability to interact with her environmental data.
Write a review of this experience – would you use this system for your personal understanding? What kinds of feedback loops are built into the design of the system?
Slides from the Strata talk. Thanks all for the lively twitter conversation.
See you tomorrow at Strata SC:
Jen van der Meer (Luminary Labs)
9:35am Tuesday, 02/26/2013
Location: Ballroom CD
Data is Not a Business Model
Big data does not necessarily lead to big business outcomes. It is a rare business leader who even asks the biggest questions of what big data can do.
Everyone is looking for ways to define data as an asset that can be monetized. But data itself will never move the needle for the Fortune 1000. Data is a means to an end. The end is not just insight, or knowledge, or brief moments of wisdom (when marveling at gorgeous data visualizations). The end we seek is wise action.
I will outline the key pitfalls data geeks fall prey to, and how you are most certainly too smart for your own good when talking to us MBAs. I will show how your service can deliver evidence-based decision-making to the people that matter on the front lines, and at the highest levels of the organization. I will also show you how to design data services that get people to care about their jobs, and their contribution to their company goals.
This talk will help anyone who is tasked with determining how to get more business action out of data.
All links in this presentation are located here at Annotary.
Slideshare class notes from Jen van der Meer.
To prepare for next week’s assignment, read:
Protecting Patient Privacy: Strategies For Regulating Electronic Health Records Exchange NYCLU, read Part 2 and Conclusion
Optional:
Rekindling the Patient Privacy Debate.
When Patients Tell Their Stories, Their Health May Improve.
Wit. By Margaret Edson. Dramatists Play Service, Inc., Mar 1, 1999.
Prepare a written and spoken argument (2 pages, 5 minutes) clearly outlining your position on the topic of open data and patient empowerment. Do you feel that patients should own their own data? Do you feel that people should be uniquely identified in an electronic health system? What are the for and arguments against?
This is taken from the Op-Ed structure. (From the Op-Ed Project)
Format:
All links in this presentation are located here at Annotary.
Slideshare class notes from Jen van der Meer
Class assignment for 2/25/2013
Assignment:
Write a one page essay to be presented in class. Do you find the quantified self movement appealing? Give examples of how you would imagine using data to monitor your own health, or the health of someone you care for.
You will be asked to present your work, so practice rehearsing your in class presentation at least two times.
Systems Thinking and The Obesity Epidemic
All links in this presentation are located here at Annotary.com.
Bodies and buildings nyu itp 2 4 13 from Jen van der Meer
Optional:
Deeper Reading:
Original Study by Christakis and Fowler: The Spread of Obesity in a Large Social Network over 32 Years. NEJM. July 26, 2007.
Critique of this study: Lyons.
The Spread of Evidence-Poor Medicine via Flawed Social-Network Analysis. Statistics, Politics, and Policy: (2011) Vol. 2 : Iss. 1, Article 2. Last revised 5 May 2011
Watch: Catherine Kerr on Cortical Measures in Mindfulness Meditation at Quantified Self.
Personal account of Weight Watchers by Laura Beck at Jezebel.
Assignment:
When developing ideas and concepts for our student projects, and future projects, business ideas, and save-the-world ideas, we often start by designing for ourselves.
For this assignment, research a part of the world at a local level (city, state, province, county) that has a problem with obesity. The only requirement: pick somewhere that you have never been.
In a one page essay, describe the social, cultural, technological, economic, and other conditions of this region that may be contributing to a growth in the prevalence of obesity. You may choose to write a non-fiction account or take this as a creative writing assignment – imagining a first person day-in-the-life account of what it feels like to live here.
You will be asked to present your work, so practice rehearsing your in class presentation at least two times.
Class Start and Intro to Systems Thinking, Bodies, and Buildings.
Read ALL OF Donella Meadows:
Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System
Take leverage points 9, 8, 7.
Write a 1 page or 500-6000 word essay on the following topic:
How do mobile apps try to affect leverage points 9, 8, and 7.
9- The length of delays, relative to the rate of system change
8- The strength of negative feedback loops, relative to impacts they are trying to correct against
7- The gain around driving positive feedback loops
Give one example and explain how the app is or is not designed to affect each of these leverage points. How effective do you think this app will be at changing behavior?
You will be asked to present your work, so practice rehearsing your in class presentation at least two times.
