Refresh Boston
November 27, 2012
6:30PM
Microsoft NERD Center
Cambridge, MA
Register

Design Axioms
November 7, 2012
5:30 PM - 7:30 PM
Harvard Business School
Cambridge, MA

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.

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.

COLUMBUS, OH (U.S.)—July 26th, 2012—Involution Studios, a software design consultancy based in Boston, MA, announced the opening of a second studio location in Columbus, OH.

"We are so excited about the new Columbus studio," said Dirk Knemeyer, a founder and current chairman of Involution Studios. "From our first project in Palo Alto, California to our studio in Silicon Valley, then Boston, and most recently here in Columbus, we are realizing the vision of bringing absolutely world class software design to as many people as possible."

Energy is the industry that IT forgot — or at least until recently. While sectors as varied as finance and healthcare, entertainment and communications have roared ahead with digitization, automation, and analytics, the energy industry has not evolved as rapidly. Despite this fact, it's clear that the future of energy lies in software. In both conservation and sustainability, software offers great possibilities for innovation — enabling companies to understand consumption trends, make better decisions about energy usage, and improve efficiency and performance over time.

Last week, at the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council seminar "New Tools for the Energy Challenge", panelists discussed the opportunities and challenges facing the fledgling energy software space. The panel, moderated by Gabe Cole, SVP Transformation Services at technology consulting firm Telwares, included: Badri Raghaven, CTO of FirstFuel; Ganesan Ravishanker, CIO of Wellesley College; Lillian Smith, Principal User Experience Designer at Autodesk; and Kevin Johnson, CEO of Outsmart Power Systems.