We put a lot of emphasis on the “user experience” of everyday life at Building H. We believe that a key to increasing healthy behaviors is to lower the barriers to them -- making it easier and more natural to eat better, be physically active, sleep more, interact socially and get outdoors. So, for example, we’re interested in questions like how to make it easier to cook a family dinner and how to make using public transportation as easy as using Uber. But the narrow focus on the user can also have consequences, as Kevin Slavin articulates in his excellent essay, Design as Participation. Referring to the designers of “disruptive” new systems that have elevated consumer experiences, Slavin writes:

“But as designers construct these systems, what of the systems that interact with those systems? What about systems of local commerce and the civic engagement that is predicated upon it? Or the systems of unions that emerged after generations of labor struggles? Or the systems that provided compensation for some reasonable number of artists? When designers center around the user, where do the needs and desires of the other actors in the system go? The lens of the user obscures the view of the ecosystems it affects.”

Three of the articles we’re sharing in this edition spotlight the affected ecosystem associated with the food experience. They profile the activists working to battle the injustices that have been pervasive in agriculture and food distribution; surface the racist and sexist history of restaurant wages and tips; and, in a story of Instacart’s recent capital raise, note the company’s relationships to workers and grocers.

User experience matters, of course -- it is critical to shaping behavioral choices. The exciting challenge lies in designing outstanding user experiences that treat the surrounding ecosystems -- and the people that act within them -- sustainably and with respect.

- Steve & Thomas

The Activists Working to Remake the Food System
Writing in the New York Times Style Magazine, Ligaya Mishan looks at activism and the issues at every stage of the food chain and explores the tensions between the view of food as a major determinant of health and the need to focus on the economic, racial and environmental injustices associated with its production and distribution. Read more.

Instacart Valuation Rises to $39 Billion in Latest Fundraising
The pandemic has been very good to Instacart, which has benefitted from an increasing demand for grocery delivery and newly unemployed workers seeking gig jobs. Read more.

Google Maps Will Now Let You Pay for Public Transportation and Parking Through Its App
Back in the user experience department, Google is lowering a barrier to using public transportation by making it possible to purchase tickets following a directions search. Read more.

Lime Drops New Automatic Transmission E-Bikes, Buys $50M Worth of Them
Lime is also focused on improving the user experience -- adding automatic transmission to its newest generation of shared e-bikes, along with an easier locking system and other improvements to improve ease-of-use. Read more.

Live from the Internet, Here Comes Audio Social Media
Taking off from the popularity of Clubhouse, Marina Garcia-Vasquez, writes in New_ Public about the powerful effects of human voice and notes the emergence of other startups looking to foster better social connection using voice platforms. Read more. 

Are Some Foods Addictive?
There‘s a debate about this and Anahad O’Connor explains both sides. Do “addictive” foods truly alter our state of mind like other addictive substances -- or is it just a question of most people being faced with a remarkable diversity and abundance of appealing, heavily marketed foods? Read more.

Cheese Actually Isn’t Bad for You
In yet another nutrition plot twist, cheese might be getting exonerated. Gilad Edelman writes about the latest thinking, which is that cheese is now seen as neutral or slightly good, depending on the type of cheese, but doesn’t seem to be unhealthy. It is often guilty by association -- think a ham & cheese sandwich on white bread with a side of potato chips. There’s much still unknown, of course. Read more.

E-mail Is Making Us Miserable
We share this next item a bit sheepishly, given that this is an email newsletter, but it’s worth a read (at your leisure, no stress). Cal Newport digs into the research around email and how people react to it. Our innate desire to connect and to maintain our connections, when encountering the overwhelming volume of professional email, often leaves us with the feeling that we’re failing to connect adequately, leading to ongoing, low-key anxiety. Key quote: “We’re miserable, in other words, because we’ve accidentally deployed a literally inhumane way to collaborate.” Read more.

The City Where Cars Are Not Welcome
NYT’s Jack Ewing takes us to Heidelberg, Germany, which is giving a glimpse into one possible future -- a city where cars exist, but they’re the last resort for transportation. Driven mostly, but not entirely, by carbon reduction considerations, the city is emphasizing robust bus service and an extensive bicycling infrastructure. Read more.

What Ford's New Headquarters Tells Us About the Future of Transport
Possibly seeing Heidelberg as the future, Ford is talking about mobility more than cars these days and is building a new headquarters that is “designed for people, not cars… [it’s] ‘pedestrian-focused and transit-rich, connected directly to amenities.’” Allison Arieff compares it to Ford’s 1950s headquarters and reflects on the meaning of this architectural shift. Read more.

The Downsides of a 15-Minute City
We’ve featured a number of stories on the 15-Minute City concept, which, in theory, seems to facilitate healthy living. But there are risks, according to experts in a recent CityLab conference session: gentrification that could result and the likely reactions to a top-down, technocratic approach that ignores the history of urban planning interventions that have served to segregate and divide. Community engagement is critical to mitigating these risks. Read more.

Microsoft Mesh to Bring Holograms, Avatars to Any App
At its recent Ignite conference, Microsoft announced Mesh -- a platform that will support AR and VR apps across a variety of platforms. It’s a classic Microsoft play -- as Protocol’s Janko Roettgers writes, they’re focusing on building the “plumbing,” enabling many developers to build AR/VR applications. It’s another sign that the presence of AR/VR will be big -- both in the enterprise and the consumer spaces. In a sign that the platform could generate more mobile “real-world” gaming, Niantic CEO John Hanke joined the keynote. Read more.

Big Tech Patents!
Protocol’s Mike Murphy has a regular feature where he combs the patent filings of the big tech companies to get insight into possible futures. Two recent filings, both from Alphabet, represent very different strategies to influencing people’s health behavior: one is a personal assistant that prompts you to, um, get a life; the other is a self-inflating balloon that you swallow before you eat in order to take up space in your stomach. 

How We Should Reimagine Restaurant Work in a Post-COVID-19 World
A history, born from slavery, of an industry suppressing wages; the connection between reliance on tips and sexual harassment; and massive job losses during the pandemic. These are a few of the injustices recounted by Saru Jayaraman, cofounder and president of One Fair Wage in this perspective piece for FastCompany. But there is good news: increasing numbers of restaurants are signing on to reforms, supporting the elimination of a separate minimum wage for restaurant workers. Read more. 

How to Design Better Systems in a World Overwhelmed by Complexity
Ingrid Burrington writes up a fascinating interview with architecture professor Keller Easterling about her book, Medium Design. One of the themes is our hunger for singular, transformative solutions -- as when we think a new technology will completely replace its predecessors. The better solutions, Easterling argues, come from the less glamorous idea of ecosystems evolving to include mixes of old and new. Read more.

Building H is a project to build health into everyday life, led by Steve Downs and Thomas Goetz. We believe that we need to reimagine the fundamentals of everyday life — how we eat, sleep, get from place to place, socialize and entertain ourselves — with health and well-being as explicit goals. We call attention to the need and the opportunity: Shining a light on the doers who are building health into everyday life; creating a community of thinkers and doers who believe in the #healthpositive vision; and creating tools to help companies assess the impacts of their products on the health of their customers.

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