“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.

Under a provision in Governor Deval Patrick’s fiscal 2014 plan for the state, a "modern products" Massachusetts sales tax of 4.5% will be levied on the design and engineering services that create the digital world. Massachusetts is filled with software development companies — with verticals from mobile to healthcare to enterprise. It's a key innovation sector that drives the growth of our state economy and keeps our employment — which has consistently been better than that of the nation as a whole — at a healthy rate.

So, what will the consequences of this new tax be? For every $1 million in revenue, under the Governor's proposal, a software shop will pay an additional $45,000 — on top of the payroll, property, real estate, business and any other taxes it already pays. Consider this: For every $2 million in revenue, that's $90,000 in taxes, which could cover the salary of an entry-level software engineer including benefits. The 2011 Index of the Massachusetts Innovation Economy, indicates that software and computer services accounted for $31 billion of Massachusetts economic output. If, for the sake of argument, we consider just half of the economic output as taxable software design and development services, that would result in about $695 million in tax revenue, or roughly the equivalent of 7,750 entry-level software engineering jobs. Will this new proposed tax eliminate the creation of 7,750 high-quality jobs in Massachusetts? I'm not eager to find out. Now, to be fair, the Governor's budget estimates show a figure of just a quarter billion dollars in revenue to be realized from this tax, but the true consequences, like the law itself, remain unclear. The law is vague enough that the sales tax could cover all kinds of software, from mobile apps to even Web sites.

Involution's hGraph, an open source health metrics visualization, was recently featured in Wired Magazine online, highlighted in the article, “How Restyling the Mundane Medical Record Could Improve Health Care.” The Wired spot discusses hGraph’s strong social component: By tracking the data for entire families hGraph illustrates how some conditions, like obesity and heart disease, can be affected by collective health choices.

Health IT Buzz, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services innovation blog, also mentioned hGraph as a notable entry to the Patient Health Record Graphic Design Contest, where it inspired the judges and challenged the status quo. The article notes that Involution designers “weren’t afraid to think outside the box.” A simple-to-use tool like hGraph has the potential to improve patient care, prevent medication errors, and supply clear health metrics. By making health records usable and interactive, this software can empower doctors, caregivers, and patients to make better health decisions and save lives.

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), challenged designers across the United States to re-imagine the presentation of the medical record in order to create a better patient experience. The objective of the Health Design Challenge was to create a usable, beautiful medical record enabling patients to more easily manage their health, and health professionals and caregivers to more effectively understand and use patients’ health information. On January 15, from the over 230 submissions, Involution Studios entry — a dynamic, system view of your health — was selected for the online showcase, featuring the most innovative designs that challenged the status quo. There’s no doubt that a well-designed medical record has the potential to provide many positive outcomes, including improved care coordination, prevention of medication errors, and quick, on demand access to critical health information in emergency situations.

hRecord and hGraph
Involution has long been involved with the design of open source solutions for the healthcare industry. We’re sharing a sample of our hRecord designs here, including versions for iPad and iPhone. You can also view our complete Health Design Challenge submission.

The Health Design Challenge, sponsored by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), is encouraging the UX design community to rethink the presentation of the medical record in order to create a better patient experience. The objectives are to design a usable, beautiful medical record that enables patients to more easily manage their health, and health professionals and caregivers to more effectively understand and use patients' health information.

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.

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.

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.

One of the great challenges of knowledge work is in understanding how to integrate virtual tools into the oftentimes tricky realm of human communication and relationships. We take for granted that the constantly evolving toolset available to us is ultimately helpful to our productivity and ability to complete our day-to-day tasks. How did work ever get done without mobile phones and the constant stream of e-mail? But the techniques for binding it all together — the ways to manage our time and our attention in order to best take advantage of the digital without becoming a slave to it — are still largely undefined. How do we incorporate the oftentimes virtual, and sometimes real world interactions that now make up business and professional relationships? We may work far away from our colleagues, then have face-to-face meetings, then go back to working at a distance. Sometimes it feels like we've been thrust into the virtual world with no rules. Increasingly, it seems like it is the duty of knowledge workers to figure out just how we should relate to our digital workplace, and each other.

Within this chaotic sea of digital tools that we incorporate into our work lives, perhaps one of the more interesting ones is our professional social graph. With a virtual professional network, you can stay connected to business contacts over time, and potentially build these relationships for mutual benefit. The professional social graph is our virtual map of our career contacts and reflects our work lives through the relationships we've developed. LinkedIn, of course, is the most popular and prominent business network in the US, with roughly 90 million members, although others like Viadeo and XING have significant traction internationally.