Ebola infovis, Taiko, Talking Wearables: Friday Links and Round-Up

17.Oct.14
by Emily Twaddell

All over the news: Ebola Virus Disease

Ebola_map

Our RSS feeds are popping up with distressing and confusing stories that are getting uncomfortably close to home. So Juhan Sonin and intern Xinyu Liu put together Understanding Ebloa: A Visual Guide. One clinician enlightened us with the following response:

“This is a remarkable summary. The one thing I can think of that might be missing is an understanding of why Ebola is so contagious. It has, in part at least, to do with what is the viral load of the disease. For example, when someone is at the height of the illness, one-fifth of a teaspoon of that person's blood can carry 10 billion viral Ebola particles. An untreated HIV patient, by comparison, has just 50,000 to 100,000 particles in the same amount of blood. Someone with untreated hepatitis C has between 5 million and 20 million.”

We've distributed the link locally and it has also been picked up by Patient Safety and Quality Healthcare in Ebola: A Crash Course in Reliability. Our research and design work continues as we do what we can to support the worldwide efforts to save lives and stop the spread of this disease.

A few distractions if you find yourself hyperventilating by now:

Sein_taiko

Sein has been helping Miles build Taiko drums in his Rhode Island studio.

Designer / Maker Sein Woo recently attended Taiko drum lecture and performance at Harvard University, featuring her friend and fellow RISD graduate Miles Endo. Miles’ father, Kenny Endo, is a well-known professional Taiko player who travels all over the world to perform and teach Taiko drumming.


sparkfun_lilypad

If you like creating with wearable technologies—we are thinking perhaps a Juhan Talking Plush Doll with Sparkfun and the LilyPad e-textiles line.


boston_layer-lapse

Just in case anyone thinks we are not having a love affair with our own fair city, this is a pretty cool take on Beantown. We do love that dirty water.


And from this week:

On The Digital Life: Digital and UX News - Kano, Windows 10, and Digital NYC Jon and Dirk talk about some of the latest tech and UX news including: the Kano computer kit for kids, which encourages a childhood interest in engineering; the unveiling of Windows 10 and what it means for the "universal" user experience; and the launch of Digital.nyc as a focal point for the Silicon Alley start-ups and venture capital firms of New York City.

On Wednesday, part 4 in our Emerging Technologies series focuses on UX for the IoT, Connected Environments, and Wearables.

Tuesday’s Best Practices in Hiring a Digital Design Studio provided a summary of the popular four-part series launched earlier this year.

And for fun and inspiration, don’t miss Monday’s Around the Studio: Adventures in Mentoring at MIT.

Topics: design innovation, Business of Design, Ebola