In this special to Orange Juice, graphic designer Erin Williams shares her experience with a new digital health technology in her quest for fitness.

For five years, bicycling was my primary mode of transportation. I rarely felt the need to hit the gym, because I logged 16 miles a day with my daily commute. But while cycling was great for my legs and my heart, the last year of this journey grew increasingly stressful as tensions with L.A. drivers escalated, landing me in the hospital with a head injury last summer. When I finally gave in and bought a car, my family and coworkers were relieved not to have to worry, but I found new things that I need to worry about. In my first month of driving, I gained five pounds. Five! In one month! I realized that I could no longer count on my heart rate and blood pressure being excellent every time I went to the doctor, could no longer eat a plate of pasta just because I went for a long ride.

I had been getting all of my exercise without ever having to think about it; getting on my bike in the morning was simply habitual.

At the office, I’ve been learning about how new technologies are changing the way people approach healthcare—changing the conversation from disease management to preventative care and healthy lifestyles, and getting patients more engaged and invested in their own outcomes.

I decided to test some of the Connected Health tools I was learning about at the office. CONTINUE »

Reflecting on Movember, Karten Design Designer Jonathan Abarbanel discusses the role of storytelling in men’s health.

Karten Design just finished up a successful Movember. By growing mustaches for a month, 10 of our men used their faces to start conversations about men’s health and raise almost $1,000 dollars to fund men’s health research and education.

We’ve had a lot of conversations in our studio during Movember. Most were about mustaches, but a few were about larger issues of health. I wonder, as Movember turns into December and most of the men at Karten Design shave their Mo-staches, what the experiences and conversations have meant to those of us who participated.

Last week I sat down with our Movember Team Captain Jonathan Abarbanel to get his point of view. A father of two young children and the husband of a children’s librarian, Jonathan is something of an expert at storytelling. Recently, Jonathan took a class in Narrative and Digital Media at UCLA Extension, and it’s made him think about the role that stories play in our everyday lives. He believes that stories are all around us, and we uncover new stories by doing new things. I asked Jonathan what sorts of stories he’s found in Movember. CONTINUE »

You may have noticed something hairy happening around our studio. This year for the first time, Karten Design has formed a team to participate in Movember. During the month of November, 11 of us “Mo Bros” have pledged to grow a moustache for 30 days, becoming walking, talking billboards for men’s health causes– specifically cancers affecting men.

This is a cause near to my heart. I’ve had friends and even employees who are survivors of testicular and prostate cancer. But beyond those experiences I’ve witnessed directly, I see an unmet need for men to take more ownership of their health.

CONTINUE »

With the introduction of Timeline a few weeks ago, Facebook emphasized the importance of life stories in human interaction. This interface taps into the way that people innately understand their own lives with a narrative structure that allows users to express a whole identity, rather than a fragmented view of events and photos.

Timeline is just one example of how companies can tap into the power of narrative to communicate with customers on a meaningful level. Recently, my team found inspiration in an unlikely source: health care. The USC Body Computing Conference 5.0 highlighted organizations that are blurring the lines between medicine and entertainment to change how consumers view their health. I asked Karten Design’s resident storyteller, Anne Ramallo, to expand on what our designers and researchers took away from the event.

CONTINUE »

Is indecision getting in the way of your life? Do you waste hours of your life mulling over decisions like:

Q:

By now, you’ve probably already read about the new products introduced at CES 2011 and started building your new gadget wish list. But what does it all mean?

Karten Design digested our experience over two days at CES into five trends that are starting to influence product design and consumer behavior.

Blurring Boundaries: Digital convergence means that the same content is universally accessible across a broad range of devices, from TVs to computers and smart phones to tablets. This year we saw new devices that blur not only content boundaries, but boundaries between product categories. Google TV goes a step beyond the “Smart TV,” allowing people to search the full web on a television. The Motorola Atrix, designed to essentially become a user’s primary digital hub, enables users to extend the capabilities of their smart phones when used with Motorola’s three docks—one of which transforms the phone into a laptop computer. Tablet designs like the Samsung PC7 Slider or the Lenovo IdeaPad U1 create a tablet/netbook hybrid category. Until now, we’ve all been pretty certain about the categories of devices that we need to manage our daily productivity and entertainment. This year’s products re-open the discussion for adventurous early adopters willing to test new solutions. I’m already looking at cancelling my cable TV.

Express Yourself: User generated content receives a creative boost at the hands of companies seeking to engage their customers by empowering them. From fabric printing and embroidering to digital photography, companies are providing products and interfaces that elevate creativity and allow customers to unleash their inner artists. Proud parents can now capture their kids’ birthday parties in 3D thanks to a new line of cameras and camcorders from Sony. Casio’s new TRYX camera takes a more low-tech approach to creativity with a frame that can twist and turn to capture shots from new angles. Photographers can load their shots from any camera onto Casio’s Imaging Square, an online service that will enable users to transform their photos into art prints with effects such as watercolor and pointillism, or print them out wirelessly with special edge effects on Polaroid’s Polaprinter, part of the company’s Grey Label designed by Lady Gaga and her team at Haus of Gaga. With products like these, perhaps creative output, not consumption, will become a standard of personal success.  

Invisible Hardware: Apple started this trend with minimal design that disappears behind the content it presents. Now most major American manufacturers have adopted a minimal design aesthetic. Look no further than the ultra thin bezel on Samsung’s 2011 TVs to prove the point: Hardware is taking a back seat to content and interface. Traditional design—that is, creative exploration of form, material color and finish—was more the prerogative of smaller Asian companies, which exhibited some delightful objects that served as ends in themselves, from panda-shaped speakers to a host of colorful Apple accessories.

Making Information Tangible: Speaking of content and interface, new innovations in these categories certainly deserve a spotlight. Today we typically control computers with mice and track pads, and TV and games with handheld remote controls. These interfaces are intangible and distant, and have essentially remained the same for years. Following closely on the heels of the Wii, the iPad and the Kinect, this year’s interfaces and technology could really change the way we interact with digital data, making information on a screen more tangible and immediate. The 80 new tablets at CES allow users to hold content in their hands and interact by direct touch. I believe this natural and intuitive approach to manipulating information is the tablet’s chief draw. This sort of personal, direct control may become even more pervasive if companies like 3M, Touch Revolution and PrimeSense are successful in making touch screen displays and gesture control a part of the daily environment in education, gaming, business and retail. With such friendly, touchable, portable screens, look out for more blurring than ever between the virtual and “reality.”

Information = Motivation: One thing was certain at CES: there’s an abundance of information at our fingertips. In addition to content for entertainment, this year’s introductions included smart appliances and smart monitors that can capture, record and display endless information. Want to see how many calories you burned today? Look no further than BodyMedia’s FIT armband monitor. Want to make sure that your mom in Florida got out of bed and took her medications today? Lifecomm and Proteus Biomedical can help you in the near future with (respectively) a stylish body-worn monitor that provides mobile access to emergency assistance and a smart pill that can register whether a patient is compliant with their medication regimen. Maybe you’d like to know how to save on your energy bills? A host of Smart Appliances from virtually every manufacturer let you monitor real-time and historic energy usage on TVs, smart phones and smart meters. Beyond just supplying data, most of these smart devices present it through info graphics and games, making the underlying data actionable and meaningful—a catalyst to real behavior change.

Empathy is a prized characteristic in my field of work. It’s the source of inspiration, the evidence of your imagination. I’ve always considered myself an empathetic person: easily moved by the stories of others, able to hop fluidly from one viewpoint to another. Then my musical theatre teacher told me I’m “not a feeler.”

“Anne, you are a do-er,” my teacher, Cathy, began as I stood on stage, awaiting my critique. I gazed past the bright lights into the dim audience where she sat with my classmates. A do-er, she said—which is a great thing—and a thinker. But apparently not a feeler.

Personal insights like this are common in my musical theatre class, which goes beyond music, or even performance, and digs into the subtle intricacies of interpersonal communication. Every couple of weeks as I perform a new song, I develop a new character and a new situation. More than singing, I am creating a story, mining the lyrics and the music for meaning and figuring out how to communicate that meaning authentically to my audience.

“The feeling! That’s what we’re working on,” Cathy continued. “I want you to really try to tap in more to how you feel. How you are responding to your situation?”

After three years of working together, I know her well enough to know what she’s asking for. And it’s not just emotion, but a concrete physiological response. When I say in my monologue that I met the man of my dreams, I may feel “happy” or “excited.” But what does that excitement feel like, physically? Where do these emotions come from inside my body and how does their energy travel through me? It’s the light in my eyes, the flush in my cheeks, the effusiveness in my gestures. Perhaps a bit of bewilderment at the intensity of my own joy that’s expressed as a self-conscious touch of my hair. That’s the kind of thing she expects to see from me on stage.

The feeling!  I realize how I gloss over these sensations in my daily life. I mask them with words. At the end of a long day, I might say that I’m “stressed” — a word that becomes shorthand for the change in my pulse, or the tension in my muscles that adds a brusqueness to my movements, a clipped efficiency to my footsteps. When I think about it, I’m amazed by the amount of activity that happens inside of me that I do not consciously feel.

I think it’s this consciousness that is the key to empathy. I have to admit that having my ability to feel called into question stung a bit, so I dug in and began to look for an answer to my problem. Being a word person, I began by re-examining the definition of empathy. A quick Google search took me to Wikipedia, which defined it as “the ability to share the sadness or happiness of another through consciousness.”

With my original understanding of empathy and feeling, it would have been enough to be aware of the verbal and physical signals that other people are sending. Basically, just be observant and sympathetic. But my musical theatre exploits have opened my eyes to a broader definition, which I now take to mean a two-way consciousness– an awareness of others, as well a consciousness of my own feelings that allows me to recognize their expression in others and express them more clearly to others.

This heightened sense of empathy can be an important part of the creative process in any discipline, whether delivering a dramatic performance or designing a dramatic form language. If you really understand and really experience the feeling behind an emotion, then you can re-create it more authentically. Done well, a craft becomes a form of communication in which an audience or an end user can recognize the truth and, hopefully, a piece of themselves.

So I’m trying to be more conscious. For my new song this week I’m delving into the expression of feelings like loneliness, want, frustration and regret. I’m working in front of mirrors, recalling experiences in my past. And how does it feel? When I get up on stage, feel the physical pull of these emotions in my chest, hear them coloring my words and, after it’s all over, hear a sincere applause from my classmates, it doesn’t feel like loneliness at all. 

Co-authored by Erin Mays

Who would have thought that a professional design mixer in the scenic Topanga State Park would turn into a case study on group decision-making? I guess that’s what you get when you put 10 designers, strategists and researchers together on a Saturday morning…

This Saturday, we joined a group of co-workers and local design professionals on a hike in LA’s Topanga State Park. After 2.5 miles of uphill hiking, we paused to take in the view at the Parker Mesa Overlook, which on a clearer day would have provided panoramic views from the Pacific Ocean to the San Fernando Valley.

That’s when it happened. On one of the Cliffside benches, we spotted a set of BMW keys, presumably forgot, dropped, or just plain lost.

Our hearts immediately went out to the guy[1] who would soon return to his car only to find himself locked out and unable to return home for a shower. Our group quickly fixated on the lost keys and the dilemma they presented: how best to see them returned to the owner. As a group of trained problem solvers, our instincts took over and we found ourselves asking questions.

CONTINUE »