Arterial Plumbing: Data visualisation and diagnosing heart disease

It’s encouraging to learn of scientists actively researching and highlighting the importance of data visualisation in life-saving areas.
Two aspects of data-viz principles have been demonstrated by Professor Hanspeter Pfister and Michelle Borkin, at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, from a study on diagnosing heart disease.

Our goal was to design a visual representation of the data that was as accurate and efficient for patient diagnosis as possible,” says lead author Michelle Borkin, “What we found is that the prettiest, most popular visualization is not always the most effective.

Credit: Michelle Borkin

Traditional visualisation builds a 3D model of the arteries: but a relational 2D model proved more helpful. The circumference of each artery and their proportionate lengths are outlines, as well as the branching points. The result is a network diagram.

Typical scientific colour schemes for data are of the rainbow variety. The Harvard researchers showed that using black to red instead improved the quality of diagnoses for heart disease.

With the new visualization, an arterial system that would previously have been reconstructed in 3-D (left) is instead deconstructed and shown with each branch separated from the main vessel. Arteries are then represented as 2-D branches (bottom right) whose dimensions are proportional to the circumference and length of the corresponding artery. Branching points and relationships between branches are also displayed.

Full article on PhysOrg.com here

How many steps to happiness?

Since 1970, the UK’s GDP has doubled, but people’s satisfaction with life has hardly changed. (NEF)   Evidence-based approaches to well-being are emerging and there are a plethora of initiatives and groups transforming those insights into policy and public health campaigns. Recently the Action for Happiness campaign was launched. With a manifesto in the Guardian by one of the directors, Mark Williamson and a smashing website by Public Zone, yet another positive trumpet call has been sent to take care of our well-being. So, what are the suggested means to that end? Below is a rapid countdown from ten of some tactics to gain happiness from current to ancient thinking. Each suggestion is the outcome of volumes of research and wisdom….

10 –  Action for Happiness   – keys to happier living:
With the handy mneumonic “GREAT DREAM”: We have Giving, Relating, Exercising, Appreciating, Trying Out; Direction, Resilience, Emotion, Acceptance, Meaning. Image below. Read more about these here.

5 – New Economics Foundation – ways to well-being
Check out this report on evidence-based approaches to well-being by the  New Economics Foundation published in 2008. There’a wealth of evidence-based reports on that site. They have distilled a huge amount of research into the following:
Connect, Be active, Take notice, Keep Learning, Give

3 – A summary of the Dharma
Or maybe the summary of all the teachings of the Buddhas might be easier to remember:
Commit not a single unwholesome action,
Cultivate a wealth of virtue,
To tame this mind of ours,
This is the teaching of all the buddhas.

1 – The Golden Rule
As Karen Armstrong explains in her TED talk, the emotion of compassion is the vital central point of all the great terditions:
Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.

<1 – Richard Wiseman’s 59 seconds
If you’d rather have a time-based approach check out the book 59 Seconds by Richard Wiseman, which seeks to expose self-help myths by presenting scientifically proven techniques to help you in less than a minute.

It’s a great disservice to list these without detailing each in better depth. I hope to expand on this in future entries.

Are lists and bullet points helpful at all do you think? What other lists are there out there? Schlep your ideas into a comment below.

RSS Compassion Feed

Love this project by the Design Interaction Team in Goldsmiths, London is so simple but followed months of ethnographic research. Those Poor Clare nuns aren’t allowed whizzy gadgets, only the basics of life. So they verge on being cut off from life, and thus, their prayers following a similar fate. This cross shaped device fits aesthetically into the world of the convent, but also distills the news into a stream of basic messages, on which to contemplate and connect (I presume). Maybe we could all do with a little action-based tweet reading? 

Pop!Tech Presentation

Watch the video on Pop!Tech’s site here.
Read the article here.
(Thanks for a nice photo Kris!)

What is Universal Design?

2010 theme: Technology in the City. Seminar held at the Radisson.

Ireland’s wracked by frustration at its inept government this week but after a day with the professionals of the National Disability Authority, I have more faith in the public servants than the bumbling leadership. Donal Rice and Barbara Schmidt-Belz summed it up: ‘Bad design excludes’ they say and quote Victor Papanek that ‘Good design applies to all people’.

Universal Design, or Design for Accessibility is the theme of the annual seminar at the Radisson, Dublin, which includes a 24hour Design Challenge. Julia Cassim, of the Helen Hamlyn Centre (RCA) gave an excellent quick fire overview of the area. There is a perception that designing for the disabled restricts creativity and simply involves the making of special gadgets and aids.

She counters saying that ‘Disability can be a poweful creative resource in the design innovation process’ and that ‘by understanding the extreme, you can innovate for the mainstream’. Bring down the barriers between designer and the end-user. Move from designing for an unknown User to working directly with a Creative Partner. It’s a different relationship and is what the co-design process is all about.

José Angel Martinez (Technosite) is working on a project comparing e-accessability across Europe, and Non-EU (US, Canada, Australia) states. He spoke of how the term ‘disability’ isn’t helpful and is excluding, especially in the commercial realm used to marketing terminology where ‘Needs and Preferences’ is better understood. Making ATMs more accessible under challenging sunlight, language or cognitive conditions means better units for everyone, not just typically ‘disabled’ users.

Partnering with people of different accessibility needs, the designers sees the world through new eyes.

We’ve all grappled with trying to get money with an un-viewable screen, in a foreign language, maybe even when suffering a vicious headache or be under pressure in howling rain. La Caixa in Barcelona will be rolling out a large number of new accessible ATMs with an impressive array of features that are good for all, including a mirror to see who’s behind you, a surface to place your bag or wallet on, a basic screen and one with more information, various kinds of lights for visibility and safety. Download a presentation about it here.

Taking the bird’s eye view of the day, Universal Design is the hard headed reality of active compassion in design. It’s not a big deal, it’s simply considering everyone. It’s not a drag, it’s being practical and taking inspiration from new sources. You have to listen and you have to consider different sources of feedback. It makes commercial sense when embedded into the process. Of course, the way we work has to change, I’m only beginning to absorb this reality and can see that we will have to consider how to do that. (Another post to follow).

Distilling the ideas from the day and other speakers, here’s my take-away offering:

A Universal Design Manifesto

1. Forget ‘disability’ and work for the ‘needs and preferences’ of everyone.
2. Consider users at the beginning of each project. Design adaptations after the fact are expensive and marginalising.
3. ‘Understand the extreme, innovate for the mainstream’.
4. Collaborate: Designing for a ‘user’ is good but working personally with a ‘Creative Partner’ is best.

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Colours from the Blind Man

I found this fascinating article in The Observer today about Sargy Mann; “The Best Blind Painter in Peckham”. Unlike the amazing John Bramblitt of Texas, who paints by touch and only began after losing his vision, Sargy lived his years painting from perfect vision up to 36 years old  and all the way along the slow loss of sight over twenty years later.

He taught at Camberwell College of Art and was very conscious of the process and ways of seeing, very aware of how sight is actively created in the mind. Watch the film his son Peter made, which has a recording of Sargy before and after painting his first fully-blind canvas. It really shows his courage and also how particular his visual imagination has been developed. He seems to be reconstructing and both remembering and creating a scene all at once . Colour is central, despite the fact he doesn’t know if it’s ‘right’ or not. That’s ok.

Amusingly, Semir Zeki, a professor of “neuroaesthetics” in University College of London has been chasing the painter for years trying to get some MRI scans done… to track down the colour perceiving parts of his brain.

All great artists, Zeki believes, are instinctive neuroscientists; they have an innate understanding of how the brain “sees” the world, and they are fated by this knowledge to constantly try to find a correspondent visual language. Zeki pioneered, as long ago as the 1970s, the accepted understanding of the particular way in which the brain projects its concepts of colour on to the world almost from birth. For Zeki, seeing is never a passive process. When we look at a painting, as his sensitive MRI scanning proves, different bits of information are immediately separated and sent to discrete anatomical corners of our brains for processing. Our brains respond to this compartmentalised information at slightly different rates; colour is processed before form, for example, and form before motion. Having been taken apart, as it were, a painting that we love is never simply put back together again in our heads; rather it “exists” dynamically in the interplay between responses of different parts of the brain. That combination of responses can create a puzzling, powerful and lasting engagement with the image, an emotional response.

If someone is blind from birth, how do they experience the first impressions of a sensory experience? According to the scientist, we process colour first, but does this get substituted by another sense(s)?

Rapid Change – POP!TECH Reviews

Yesterday I had a wonderful chat with Dan Suwyn from the Rapid Change Group about how Emotionally}Vague results could be useful in their workshop contexts. He had fascinating examples of how current knowledge is used in down-to-earth ways with people adapting to change in organisational contexts.  The Rapid Change blog is straight-up on matters around emotional intelligence, brain science and how current cognitive research can be applied in real ways – useful for business and education. Dan has just written some succinct reviews of the PopTech presentations. Check out “What’s an Analogy for Being Wrong?”, “What exactly is being Brain Dead?”,  “Four Questions for When Things go Wrong”,  “Verb, Target, Outcome” and “The Illusion of Attention” You can probably see the theme running through this year’s conference: Brilliant Accidents, Necessary Failures, Improbable Breakthroughs. And you can catch a review of the E}V talk here too.

Speaking at POP!TECH – 2010

The opening ceremony included an hilarious Rube Goldberg machine

500 people watching, 60K over the interweb

The Q&A sessions were short, but sweet

Yep, that’s me. Argh!

Only 5 minutes left!

During each presentation, a poster was created.

Waiting to speak, or just back from the stage…

Thankfully Image is much bigger than Lady

Andrew was the glue that kept the whole show together

Helen Thomas / Jen Tarr – Dance injuries

In order to examine the social contexts around dancers who experience pain and injuries, researchers from London College of Fashion used a 3D body scanner along with interviews. The project, Pain and Injury in a Cultural Context, Dancers’ Embodied Understanding and Visual Mapping asked  200 subjects to map current and past pain and injury sites onto the their own body scan. The same technology is being used at Hull University to measure the changing size of Britain’s children.

Seth Godin – The Lizard Brain

He has a certain way of really driving straight to the point, but in his own way. Seth Godin puts a distinct twist on describing fear, how it works, how it is part of us, how it affects everyone… More detail in the latest book Linchpin, which he considers a summary of his preceding ones.

The resistance grows in strength as we get closer to shipping, as we get closer to an insight, as we get closer to the truth of what we really want. That’s because the lizard hates change and achievement and risk.