Author’s note: This blog post is inspired by the 1924 novel “We” by Yevgeny Zamyatin. A dystopian tale set in an undated future, “We” unfolds through the protagonist’s journal. In our story the narrator uses a gender neutral pronoun set, “ze/zir/zem,” and dates are expressed in binary form. You may find this usage and satirical approach a little disruptive to your reading flow at first, but the story of disruption is what we’re all about today.

Heading to UXPA Boston tomorrow?

Look for the Involution Studios booth. Meet our designers or catch up with old friends. Ask Jon Follett to sign your copy of Designing for Emerging Technologies.

If you have been following The Digital Life, you might recall that Invo founder Dirk Knemeyer was traveling in Asia last month. He shared his impressions of the unique cultural intersections of the first and third worlds in China in The View From China. Following that, in A Tour of Asia, he reflected on his experiences there including significant cultural differences, observations about the use of technology, and significant factors from an economic perspective.

As an interdisciplinary design team dedicated to creating the future of healthcare, we are proud to be a returning sponsor of the Health Experience Refactored conference taking place next week in Boston.

Invo Spring Events

The snow mounds are melting in the Boston area. We can finally get out without a shovel, and we have some big plans for spring. Join us as we explore design, emerging technology and the future of health.

We are getting accustomed to having the world in the palm of our hands, what with the pocket-sized computer that is also a phone, a camera, and a set of encylopedias that we carry around.

The turkey coma has come and gone and the trees are sporting colorful lights.

My most recent family gathering included a few of my favorite engineers, so I brought back this gem to share.

 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.

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.

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.