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There’s a famous quote from Bobby Kennedy about the inadequacy of the gross national product (GNP) as a measure of our nation’s progress. He laments about what the GNP counts -- firearms, cigarette advertising, jails, armored cars for police, air pollution and more -- and reflects on what it misses:
“Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.”
Measurement matters. It allows us to learn, to track progress and to set and achieve targets. And that simple truth echoes in several of the stories in this edition -- in Data & Society’s plea for more nuanced measurements of how people use screens and alternatives to how we gauge the success of products; in Amazon’s attempt, through Halo, to understand better the tenor of people’s social interactions; in the quest for Finnish researchers to link exposure to nature to changes in our immune system. A consistent theme of Building H and the stories we share with all of you is that our health is influenced by a broader range of factors than most people realize and that our health systems are equipped to track and to act upon. We’ve featured stories linking health to sleep, noise, daylight, circadian rhythms, our microbiomes, social connection, purpose, stress, exposure to nature and to water, and experiences of racism. In some cases, the science underlying these links is still emerging and scientists are still identifying the measures that really do matter. But it’s imperative that we begin to lay the groundwork for a broader set of behavior- and exposure-oriented public health measures.
The changes we hope to see -- innovations in products and services leading to shifts in our environments, leading to shifts in behavior at scale -- will not result in changes to clinical outcomes overnight. We will need to track progress in patterns of activities -- the ways in which we eat dinner and our modes of transportation, for example -- and more summative indicators of nutrition consumption and physical activity -- in order to capture early progress and -- crucially -- to understand how these patterns vary across different groups. We’ll need better metrics and greater efforts to capture them, regularly, at scale.
- Steve & Thomas
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"It's easier to reform the environment
than it is to attempt to reform people."
—Buckminster Fuller
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Good Intentions, Bad Inventions: The Four Myths of Healthy Tech
In the wake of the debates about The Social Dilemma, Amanda Lenhart and Kellie Owens, of Data & Society, wrote a short report identifying fours myths of healthy tech, including biological determinism, tech solutionism and the importance of growth and engagement as metrics. A key takeaway: nuance matters. Read more.
What Forest Floor Playgrounds Teach Us About Kids and Germs
Finnish researchers recently tested the biodiversity hypothesis in a randomized controlled trial in which they covered the urban daycare playgrounds of some children with soil taken from a nearby forest and studied the effects on the kids’ microbiomes and their immune systems. The results showed a greater diversity of bacteria and markers of improved immune response. Read more.
Hispanics Live Longer Than Most Americans, But Will the US Obesity Epidemic Change Things?
Writing in The Conversation, Penn State professors Michelle Frisco and Jennifer Van Hook explore the trends in life expectancy for immigrant and U.S.-born Hispanics. Hispanics have longer life expectancy than Whites in the U.S., but the rise in obesity among Hispanics, especially among those born in the U.S., could change that. Read more.
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Teens Did Surprisingly Well in Quarantine
Psychologist Jean Twenge reports in The Atlantic about a survey of 1500+ teens conducted from May to July that shows that the mental wellbeing of teens is largely comparable to 2018 (when a similar survey was fielded). Given the times, it’s a surprising result and the causes aren’t clear, but the survey noted several differences in teens' lives as compared with 2018: more sleep, more family time and some shifts in technology use (e.g. more videochatting, less texting, less social media). Read more.
Love Thy Neighbor
Morgan Clendaniel goes deep in a profile of Nextdoor and its CEO, Sarah Friar, for FastCompany. Nextdoor, which in theory provides a platform to bring communities together -- and which has played a growing community role in the pandemic, has often devolved into the worst aspects of communities and has been rife with racial profiling. Friar centers her vision for the company on kindness and disavows metrics like engagement and time spent in app in favor of utility (measures, again). Clendaniel nails the tension: “But perhaps even more crucially, as the pandemic rages on and questions of social inequality persist, it seems unclear whether our future will be one of random acts of generosity, as preached by Friar. Or if panopticism will rule the day, and neighborhoods will become prisons of our own making, powered by a stitched-together surveillance regime of doorbell cameras and accusatory social media posts.” Read more.
Actual Self-Driving Taxis Are Hitting City Streets
They’re here. Or there, to be more specific. Waymo has announced that people in a 50-square-mile area of Phoenix will soon be able to hail fully self-driving taxis. Read more.
How Oakland Got Real About Equitable Urban Planning
Rikha Sharma Rani tells the story of how Oakland adapted its process for community input and urban planning, pivoting from an initial Slow Streets approach, which catered more to gentrified areas, to Essential Places, which focuses more on protecting pedestrians in low-income communities of color. Keys to the change were better outreach and listening -- and digging deeper into concerns among residents whose voices are less heard in traditional community input processes. Read more.
Amazon Halo’s Principal Medical Officer Talks Privacy, Shortcomings with Competitors, and Why It’s Now or Never for the Device
Kevin McAllister conducts a fascinating interview for Protocol with Maulik Majmudar, the chief medical officer for Halo, the new Amazon fitness/health wearable. Majmudar makes a point we -- and others -- have made as well: we’ve had a decade of digital health products and key public health indicators like obesity have gotten significantly worse. Majumdar addresses issues like algorithmic bias and talks about Halo’s most controversial -- and intriguing -- feature: measuring and assessing the wearer’s tone of voice throughout the day. The feature represents one of Amazon’s efforts to explore health in a broader way -- by focusing on its social and emotional aspects. Read more.
Are Shoppable Recipes About to Have Their Moment?
Steve mused about this a couple of years ago -- assembling recipes online and hitting the equivalent of a “print” button, effectively ordering the ingredients. Chris Albrecht of The Spoon notes a number of recent developments in this regard, including a foray from a grocery chain named Walmart. Read more.
HomeKit Adaptive Lighting Feature Appears for German Beta Testers
We’ve written before about the opportunity to engineer lighting to align better with the way light changes naturally throughout the day and thus creating better connection to circadian rhythms. (See our profile of Michael Herf and f.lux, for example). Apple has literally built a version of this into their OS, through HomeKit, and Philips Hue is starting to implement it. Read more.
Gowalla Is Being Resurrected as an Augmented Reality Social App
Seeking to enter the space of social, outdoor gaming that Niantic dominates with Pokémon Go, the founders of Gowalla (a location-based social app from days gone by) are developing a new AR-based social gaming experience. As TechCrunch reports, it’s a space in which Apple and Google have invested a ton, but breakaway hits have been few and far between. We’re always excited to see developments that have the potential to bring more people outdoors in the name of fun and entertainment. Read more.
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Salesforce's Futurist: If Companies Don't Adapt to Remote Work, Employees Will Leave
Protocol’s Anna Kramer speaks with Peter Schwartz, Salesforce executive and futurist, about the implications of a 20,000-person survey Salesforce just conducted on attitudes toward remote work. 60% believe remote work will become the norm and 40% say they would change jobs if it enabled them to work remotely. Schwartz sees the need for couples to address shared home (and child care) responsibilities and for architectural changes to homes as we return to our residences playing a larger -- and different -- role in our lives. Read more.
Kiwibot Will Pick up and Deliver Pizza from Piestro’s Robot Vending Machine
No humans were involved in this pizza. A robot pizza making machine hands off to a robot delivery vehicle. No word on how they’ll solve the “last staircase” problem of getting the pizza from the front door to the couch from which it was ordered. Read more.
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To Mend a Broken Internet, Create Online Parks
Eli Pariser, who co-directs Civic Signals, is in WIRED with a wonderful piece about the origins of public parks -- as distinct from the private “walled gardens” of the time -- and the need to create an analog for our online spaces. Walt Whitman makes an important cameo. Read more.
Capitalism Needs a Redesign, but Where Do We Start?
There’s plenty of talk these days about reimagining capitalism and moving beyond the primacy of shareholder value. It’s a theme we return to here regularly as building health into everyday life will happen a whole lot more easily if there are economic rewards for the companies that do so. IDEO designer Nina Montgomery lays out some ideas on first steps. Read more.
Problem Solving with Society-Centered Design
Writing for O’Reilly Media, Sarah Gold lays out a framework for “society-centered design,” advocating for a practice of “designing for the broader context of systems that we impact and shape.” “To do this,” Gold asserts, “we must be intentional about citizen empowerment, civic commons, public health, equity, and the planet.” Amen. Read more.
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