Because I’ve been a little slow learning to use Slack, I realized today that I missed some awesome links being shared around the studio and across the country. Here they are.

MakerBot Ghostly Vinyl Challenge

If you know what an LP is...or a turntable?

Design a printable, win a 3D printer! All for the love of vinyl. (Thanks, Ben Listwon!)

What role should user experience play in your organization?

The answer to this question depends very much on who and what you are. Say you’re a bootstrapped startup founded by experts in technical issues and sales. You should try to get free advice and help, or maybe trade some equity for UX design, or perhaps even rely on your own intuition until you can raise some capital. On the other hand, a large software company such as Oracle or Microsoft should make user experience a key focus and investment for every business unit, and have a strong advocate and visionary in the C-suite. Between these extremes lie many different models for deploying user experience appropriately.

The Halloween leftovers are already dwindling to the candy nobody likes. We’ve had our first snowfall. And I'm ready to knit another pair of wristwarmers for our beautiful but drafty old studio.

It is hard to believe that only two weeks ago our entire Invo team was in Camden, Maine at the 18th annual Pop!Tech conference. We braved a nor’easter, sampled chowder and local beers, downed countless oysters, and met more fascinating, brilliant, quirky, and funny people than any of us can remember. I canvassed the group last week to see what rose to the surface.

Eric Benoit: would have liked more show than tell

 Here’s what caught our attention this week.

Image source and credits: Senior Designer Brian Gartside on Behance.

Water is Life has partnered with researchers at Carnegie-Mellon and University of Virginia on the Drinkable Book Project to help provide education about and access to clean water. The pages of the Drinkable Book are treated to become water filters and also include information to educate people about the dangers of contaminated water.

Kalong-drawing Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons 

We haven't forgotten about the Ebola crisis, especially after reading Bats, Trees and Bureaucrats: Ebola and How Everything, Positively Everything, Connects. Disturbing but well researched.

We heard a heartwarming and fascinating story on NPR earlier this week when host David Greene interviewed author Judith Newman, about how a talking phone made life easier for her 13-year-old son, Gus, who has autism.

Like wildfire, word of the demise of UX agencies is spreading through the community.

Sparked by the acquisition of Adaptive Path, the closing of Smart Design in San Francisco, and an analysis by UX influential Peter Merholz, the intelligentsia are hailing the decline of UX and design agency work in technology. Exacerbating the situation are rumors that a variety of other agencies are in trouble, trying desperately to get bought as they prepare for a shutdown.

We recently published a series of six articles looking at the future of experience design for emerging technologies. For those of you who like to sit down and think for awhile about things, we've packaged them up right here so you can take them all in at once, or find any you may have missed.

While you wait for Trick-or-Treaters to ring the bell, here are some sites to explore.

Designer Eric Benoit attended Future Insights’ Ultimate Developer Event in Boston and shared a couple of finds.

This is the final article in a series of six looking at the future of experience design for emerging technologies. The first five Future of Design articles were: Emerging Technologies, Genomics and Synthetic Biology, Robotics, the IoT, and 3D Printing / Additive Fabrication.

This is the fifth in a series of six articles looking at the future of experience design for emerging technologies — including the Internet of Things, robotics, genomics / synthetic biology, and 3D printing / additive fabrication. The first four Future of Design articles were: Emerging Technologies, Genomics and Synthetic Biology, Robotics and the IoT.

Additive fabrication—more popularly known as 3D printing—is a process of creating a three-dimensional object by printing one miniscule layer at a time, based on a computer model. This flexible technology can use a wide variety of substrates including plastic, metal, glass, and even biological material. Custom production using additive manufacturing techniques promises to disrupt many industries, from construction to food to medicine. Possibilities for this technology range from immediately practical applications such as printing new parts just-in-time to fix a broken appliance; to controversial, uncomfortable realities, including generating guns on demand; to hopeful and futuristic methods, perhaps the ability to create not just viable human tissue, but complete, working organs, which could be used in transplants or for the testing of new drugs and vaccines.

All over the news: Ebola Virus Disease

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.