The team at Involution Studios — made up of Sarah Kaiser, Jane Kokernak, Kelly Mansfield, Harry Sleeper, and Juhan Sonin — created the Health Axioms card deck over an eight-month period. Starting with a dozen core, personal health habits, they turned these initial ideas into short catch phrases. Sarah and Kelly drew hundreds of sketches, which often drove the name and card story.

The creative process started with sketches of different concepts for each Health Axiom.

Next, Jane honed the narrative, based on research, and edited each axiom story arc. Throughout this iterative process of conceptualization and refinement, the team continued to brainstorm more ways — big and small — to influence health and life, incorporating those insights into the deck.

As part of the Town’s continuing effort to improve transparency, Arlington is announcing the launch of Arlington Visual Budget (AVB). AVB is a new online tool intended to provide the public with a visual representation of the Town’s financial history and outlook, as well as illustrate key trends. AVB allows users to dive into the budget like never before using graphics to more easily understand how tax dollars are spent.

“Increasing transparency and accessibility to financial information has long been a goal for the Town,” said Town Manager Adam Chapdelaine. “We hope this new feature will encourage users to learn more about Town finances and be more engaged in the annual budget discourse.”

A truly powerful electronic healthcare record (EHR) encompasses more than just passing information between the physician and the patient: It should be a tool that benefits the physician’s efficiency and, most importantly, the patient’s health.

Involution Studios is working with the University of Missouri, with Jeff Belden, MD as project lead, to design and write an eBook that offers insights into design and usability for these complex software systems. We have physicians, designers, and developers all contributing their wisdom — approaches that work, some that don’t, coupled with examples that you can see, touch, and play with. We’re not writing a how-to-guide, nor are we designing one EHR to rule them all. The EHR Style Guide is a reference to bridge the gap between software and the medical domain. The guide is for us software junkies, designers, and developers committed to the future of healthcare.

Involution Studios is driven by a mission to create better lives and a better world. We're part of a global movement to shift the health care system to one made up highly-specialized clinicians that work closely with self-monitoring, self-empowered patients and their families — aided by the continuous data driven by non-invasive personal diagnostics. Getting there will require equal parts smart technology, healthcare reform, and everyday common sense.

It all starts with awareness. That’s where Involution's new Health Axioms come in. We believe living the Health Axioms is better for our pocketbooks, smarter for our lives, and allows us to directly impact our health. Health Axioms put you in touch with habits to improve your health, life, and well-being. Our sometimes surprising, always practical axioms nudge you toward the healthiest life possible. This deck of cards will transform the way you think about yourself and what it means to be healthy.

Involution Principal, Jon Follett, editor of the upcoming book "Designing for Emerging Technologies" recently spoke with Jenn Webb, O'Reilly Radar's online managing editor and Mary Treseler, editorial strategist, on the O'Reilly Radar Podcast. In the podcast, the group discussed the challenges of understanding the disruptive power of emerging technologies — such as genomics, robotics, synthetic biology, and connected environments.

Over the next thirty years, there is little that humans can dream that we won’t be able to do — from hacking our DNA, to embedding computers in our bodies, to printing replacement organs. Because of this, we face a future where what it means to be human will be inexorably changed: Today, technology has already raced ahead of mankind’s ability to deal with it emotionally, morally, and socially.

There's no question that healthcare is an industry yearning for the advancements promised by Big Data analytics. Healthcare data is expected to grow between 1.2 to 2.4 exabytes per year — about 1,000 times the amount of data the human brain is capable of storing. This data is disparate and unstructured, making the extraction of useful information almost impossible. It is here that Big Data analytics promises to save the industry billions of dollars. This week Ricky Ribiero at Biz Tech Magazine joins the many voices investigating this trend. In his article, “Will Big Data Become the Big Savior of Health?” Ribiero illustrates how analytics can improve health outcomes and how tracking personal health, even down to the genome, can radically improve health. Ribiero cites a 2011 McKinsey & Co. report that states, “If US healthcare were to use big data creatively and effectively to drive efficiency and quality, the sector could create more than $300 billion in value every year.”

“While it’s true that analytics can reshape the way healthcare operates at an individual level,” Ribiero writes, “companies are hard at work trying to figure out how to leverage Big Data to improve health at the population level, too.”

Involution Studios' hGraph — the only open source visualization for your complete health metrics — is being featured this month in "Digital Diagnosis: A New Generation of Healthcare Technology" in EContent Magazine.

The column, written by Eileen Mullan, explores how apps and visualization services like hGraph can help cut through the hassle of going to the doctor. Mullan writes, "hGraph is [...] designed to increase awareness of the individual factors that can affect overall health. Basically, it gives you (and your doctor) a holistic view of your health. You can have your entire medical history in one place, just like that. Imagine what something like hGraph will do for the future of healthcare industry (and for the time you waste in the waiting room)?"

“Have you ever been punched in the face?” That's what Scott Sullivan, User Experience Designer at Involution, wants to know. In his Fast Co. feature article, Designers: Learn To Code! Here's How to Start, Scott assures young designers learning to code isn't that bad. "The fear of getting punched in the face holds you back from being effective in a fight," he writes. "But once you’ve been punched in the face, you realize it’s not so bad." For many designers, learning to code can be as scary as bodily harm.

Scott Sullivan's article on Fast Co Design

For years designers have been lectured about how learning to code is an integral part of smart design. Lecturing and instructing are two different things, however. Scott provides a thoughtful and insightful walkthrough of his process of learning to code, one which young designers will ultimately benefit from. And through his experience he has learned that the lecturers were right. Knowing code will make you a more intelligent designer. "The better I get at coding, the more I understand how connected they are," he writes. "As a designer in the digital spectrum, you realize that your very work—your material, which exists in the world—is code. How can you design something if you don’t know how it works?"

Be sure to read through Scott's article, Designers: Learn To Code! Here's How to Start, at fastcodesign.com. In addition to his user experience design work at Involution, Scott has a background in technology-based art and visual design.