Monthly Archive for June, 2008

The Measure of America

Published on June 18, 2008 in News. 0 Comments

Get Ready to be Surprised! Coming July 16 from Columbia University Press: The Measure of America is the first-ever human development report for a wealthy, developed nation. It introduces the American Human Development Index, which provides a single measure of well-being for all Americans, disaggregated by state and congressional district, as well as by gender, race, and ethnicity. The Index rankings of the 50 states and 436 congressional districts reveal huge disparities in the health, education, and living standards of different groups. Clear, precise, objective, and authoritative, this report will become the basis for all serious discussions concerning the realization of a fair, just, and globally competitive American society.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Sarah Burd-Sharps served as the deputy director of the United Nations Development Program’s Human Development Report Office until September 2006.

Kristen Lewis was a lead author of the water and sanitation report of the UN Millennium Project, led by Jeffrey Sachs, and writes extensively on development, gender, and the environment.

Eduardo Borges Martins was coauthor of the pathbreaking Atlas of Human Development in Brazil.

ABOUT THE DESIGN

Humantific | UnderstandingLab is an internationally recognized Visual SenseMaking firm located in New York and Madrid.

ABOUT THE PROJECT

The American Human Development Project is a nonprofit initiative funded by
Oxfam America
Conrad N. Hilton Foundation
The Rockefeller Foundation
Social Science Research Council
Additional support from
Annenberg Foundation

www.measureofamerica.org

Carefully crafted by the authors to be nonpartisan, we are hopeful that The Measure of America 2008-2009 will become a significant catalyst for societal change in the United States.

See the 5 Star reviews on Amazon.

Listen to a PodCast with the authors.

Join the New Seeing, New Understanding, New Thinking Revolution!

Become a fan of Measure of America in FaceBook.

See “Are We Really Living The American Dream? on YouTube.


Sustainability’s FlipSide

Published on June 17, 2008 in News. 0 Comments

Humantific CoFounders Elizabeth Pastor and GK VanPatter lead two hours of Inclusive Innovation exercises at the OverLap 08 Retreat in West Cornwall, Connecticut. Overlap is an annual, peer-to-peer gathering for those working at the center of emerging theory, methods and practices of innovation. Humantific believes that the present sustainability movement suffers from a content knowledge / process knowledge disconnect. To better prepare teams to tackle fuzzy complexity Humantific advocates synchronizing innovation process skills with the scale of challenges facing the planet, our communities, our organizations. Inclusive Innovation involves tools and methods to maximize collective brainpower by creating cognitively diverse and respectful environments. Process knowledge represents the flip-side of the present sustainability movement. It is a piece that is emerging as critically important as the sustainability movement begins to move beyond problem finding and into the more complex terrain of cross-disciplinary action.

See: Towards Adaptable Inquiry / Transforming That Sustainability Thing

Humantific in TIME Magazine

Published on June 17, 2008 in News. 0 Comments

Humantific was featured in the Global Business section of TIME magazine’s May 2008 issue. The article entitled Different by Design stated “A new breed of consultant is using the tools of design to solve business problems creatively. The article quoted long standing Humantific client, Surgeon Daniel Palestrant, CEO of Sermo. “Instead of bringing in a conventional consultant to help him, Palestrant visited a loft in the Flatiron district of Manhattan. Humantific made sense of Palestrant’s fuzzy ideas and turned them into huge, glossy posters with icons representing how the parts of his business fit together. Diagrams in hand, Palestrant went to venture-capital funds and returned with $40 million in start-up money. That kind of response is generating more and more heat in the emerging field of transformation design–a hybrid of business consulting and industrial design. Firms like Humantific, whose founders are designers, apply the same process used in designing sleek MP3 players and ergonomic teakettles to unwieldy intangibles like cell-phone promotions and hospital organization, transforming their effectiveness. Along the way, the field is creating some unusual teamwork between designers and business people.”

Sermo became one of the first wildly successful professional social networking platforms. Sermo is now a practicing community of 65,000 physicians who exchange clinical insights, observations, and review cases in real time — all the time.

Physicians can join the Sermo network here.

Co-Creating Strategy

Published on June 12, 2008 in News. 0 Comments

Humantific | StrategyLab has begun working with a telecommunications company in Madrid.

In StrategyLab we work upstream from a typical design brief in the fuzzy opportunity space. We combine upstream research with Visual SenseMaking to create an insights field that accelerates understanding among cross-disciplinary participants. The insights field is then connected to an externalized visual cocreation process that all team members learn and participate in. Humantific provides the research, visual sense-making and co-creation acceleration tools. Our clients provide the content knowledge. Using this unique combination repeatable transformations are co-created. This is inclusive innovation realized! In addition our clients begin using this hybrid skill-set to navigate the future and in the context of their everyday work.

For more information about Humantific services in Europe email: ask (at) humantific.com

Complexity Navigation Program

Published on June 11, 2008 in News. 0 Comments

VHA, a leading health care alliance network is working with Humantific to bring next generation design thinking to its internal consulting group tasked with helping thousands of member hospitals tackle a diversity of wicked problems.

VHA has multiple waves of consulting teams in the Complexity Navigation Program inclusive of skill-building in Strategic Co-Creation, Design Research, and Visual Sense-Making. Deeply committed to being customer-centered VHA serves 1,400 not-for-profit hospitals and more than 21,000 non-acute care health care organizations as members of its nationwide network.  With the health care industry facing never before encountered fuzzy challenges VHA seeks to proactively help its hospital members meet the change, adaptability and innovation challenges of the 21st century. 

The Complexity Navigation Program is now being expanded to Europe. For more information contact: programs (at) humantific (dot) com