Involution Studios sponsored the inaugural meetup of the Code for America Brigade in Boston on Thursday, October 25. Thanks to everyone who attended! Here are a few photos from the meeting.

For Immediate Release
BOSTON, MA - October 19, 2012 - Involution Studios today announced that hGraph, an open source system for visualizing personal health metrics, has been selected as a finalist in the Healthcare and Wellness category for the 17th Annual MITX Interactive Awards. Held annually by the Massachusetts Innovation and Technology Exchange, the Awards recognize excellence in the creation of web innovations designed, produced, or developed in New England. Since 1996 the MITX Awards have grown to become the largest and most prestigious awards competition for innovation in digital, celebrating the best creative and technological accomplishments emerging from the region.

Big things are happening for Involution client, Neumitra, a Boston-based health startup on a mission to free the world of stress, one person at a time. Last week, at DEMO Fall 2012 — the conference for emerging technologies held at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, California — Neumitra launched Bandu, its ground-breaking product for stress monitoring and reduction. Bandu monitors your body's autonomic nervous system, alerting you to moments of high stress and providing personalized solutions and suggestions to help you reach a state of calm. At the conference, Neumitra won a coveted "DEMO gods" award, and was named by Tech Crunch as one of DEMO's most interesting startups.

Neumitra co-founder Robert Goldberg speaks about Bandu at the DEMO conference.

The deleterious health effects of stress are innumerable and under-appreciated: emotional and physical disorders linked to stress include everything from depression and anxiety to heart attacks and stroke. Bandu monitors your body’s stress levels via a watch-like device that measures a variety of metrics including skin conductance, movement, and temperature.

When you're in a stressful situation, the device alerts you, initiating actions via your iPhone to help mitigate the problem. Bandu might ask you to listen to music, play a game, or give a friend or family member a call. In addition, Bandu learns if the suggested activity lowers your stress and displays the results on your smartphone in real time. With Bandu, you can determine the sources of stress in your life and do something about it.

Yesterday at the New England Health Datapalooza, held at the DCU Center in Worcester, Mass., judges Pierce Graham-Jones, Innovator in Residence at the US Department of Health and Human Services; John Halamka, CIO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Group; and Manu Tandon, CIO of the MA Department of HHS, selected hGraph, an open system for visualizing personal health metrics designed by Involution Studios, as the second place finisher in the regional competition.

Each day, more and more people go thru their lives with their head tilted downward and their thumb manipulating a handheld computer. This is not class-based behaviour: these expensive machines and/or the data plans that govern them are being accessed as readily by the cashier at Burger King as the corporate CEO or suburban soccer mom. The prevalence of these devices and the addictive behaviour that governs them infects people of all ages, professions, and places in society. In the process, we walk, drive, eat and talk while maintaining the familiar head tilted downward and thumb dancing feverishly that signifies our participation. Indeed, if "Seinfeld" were a modern show, we must assume there would be an episode featuring George Costanza attempting to use his personal computing device while "pleasuring" his befuddled girlfriend-of-the-moment.

On the world stage of the 2012 London Olympic games, in today's hyper-competitive athletic environment, there's no doubt that any advantage, no matter how small, can make a difference.

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.

Four years in the making, the first card set has been published as a physical deck, available via Amazon, and as digital art on designaxioms.com. 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. Best of all, the content is open source and ready for anyone to creatively remix, share, hack, and make these ideas better. The Design Axioms content from illustrations to words to concepts are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0.

Remember when Spam was just meat in a can? I'm not quite sure when "spam" became a daily and often painful reality of my life - sometime after 1994 but before 2000 - but if it wasn't for spam filters I suspect email as an online tool would already be obsolete. If you create something good, that people pay attention to, and can make money, it is inevitable that the parasites, crooks and "capitalists" will soon follow to piss in the once-pristine pool.

For Immediate Release
NEW YORK, New York (U.S.) – August 28, 2012 – Involution Studios Creative Director Juhan Sonin was announced today as a speaker at the O'Reilly Strata Conference on big data, data science, and pervasive computing.

The Strata Conference brings together the best minds in the field of big data to envision the future, share expertise, and learn from others driving the connected revolution. The conference is focused on providing leadership for the transformation of business, finance, media, and government through the optimal use of data collection and analysis.

The age of information is upon us, and much has been made of the great improvements to communication, collaboration, and business process efficiency as we transform from an industrial- to a knowledge-based economy. However, despite all the rapid technological changes of the past 20 years, we are still at the very beginnings of the knowledge work era. At the dawn of the industrial age, in the late 1700s and early 1800s, society underwent a similar set of changes. The agrarian life was upended, as the industrial life took hold, and people flocked from the countryside to the booming cities looking for work in newly created factories. These people were faced with whole new ways of working, new expectations, new dangers, and the new tensions as working class and management sorted out the methods for engagement and production that would eventually take hold and slowly evolve over the next 200+ years. In many ways, we are at a similar inflection point in our societal and economic transformation. What this means, at the most basic level, is that we're still figuring out how to work together in an environment that is newly defined, and spans both the virtual and physical worlds. And while there have been many discussions about how best to relate to each other virtually, and manage the tactical aspects of technology — from e-mail to instant messaging to video conferencing to cloud software — there is less discussion about how we structure our agreements, how we collaborate in a larger, strategic sense.

Freelance Nation
For designers and engineers and other innovators, perhaps the first step on this path to the new virtual knowledge work, was exemplified by the birth of freelance nation, which was well-documented by author Daniel Pink in his groundbreaking 2002 book "Free Agent Nation: The Future of Working for Yourself". Knowledge work can be done anywhere and, freed from the confines of geography and the purview of one employer, we may work with anyone we please. And so, the permanent employee model has has been relegated to one possible working arrangement out of many. Now, there are new ways to engage, and knowledge workers are experimenting with, and discovering these — from the "The Hollywood Model" of pure project-based collaboration to other, more long-term methods of partnering. We are no longer beholden to the industrial age forms of working, so why should we be constrained by the business structures that have evolved to make that type of work happen? We shouldn't. But it will, no doubt, take time to get there.