Hive Health

Monday kicked off my winter night class on Experience Design at Central St. Martins. Asymetric haircuts, country headwear, the diverse and arty greeted me for a 10 stretch of academia. I even took a pencil to sketch  with whilst looking into the mid distance.

Experience design is just that and far from just that. Dozens of man-years have been spent crafting a definition that still struggles with the difference between art and design, let alone the requirement we have to trap, cagoule and force down the edges of what it is to be experiential or to provide experience. The wooliness of the subject is refreshing and helping get my head out of the structured, problem/solution world that billable work often requires (especially on a Monday!).

From 5 senses, to 360 degree immersive sessions it’s clearly going to be an awesome 10 weeks.

My reading list is whizzing past Hegel, Marx, through terms as diverse as relational aesthetics and dystopian community. It’s been a while since I read something (Harvard biz review tends to pride itself on accessibility!) that had me rubbernecking to google this regularly. Blindingly good stuff, even this early session got me thinking like mad on a stack of plans/briefs/trickies I have in front of me.

In a world where ‘Brand is…’ is cumbersome and ‘brand does’ becomes more central to our planning model - experiential planning is pretty sexy for me. It channel planning with lipstick on, spinning on a table, air thick with perfume.

With HBR continuing to kick sand in the face of goods providers with yet another article on the worth of the experience economy. Joining the greying of the boundaries between sponsorship, co-branding, commissioned design, corporate installation etc. And Josephs Pine conforming that customer value has run away from all the  commodities and goods, towards tailored services or authentic experiences. It it  the time to try and consider how we offer these experiences, planned, proactive and of course with an audience insight bang in the centre.

With crossed fingers, in a dark, endless cold room . I am hoping that experience design and the time spent with the talent at CSM contributes a component  to me working on a structured approach to behavioural change achieved along a considered, multichannel, richer journey.

In the meantime – a rather nice Nokia experience, corporate installation, co-branded event, light show or Son et lumière (your choice).

Around 2,000 teenagers and young adults in the UK are diagnosed with cancer every year. These vulnerable patients often feel isolated, bitter, confused and afraid as they struggle to come to terms with and overcome a life-threatening disease.

In recognition of the difficulties young cancer patients face, eyeforpharma are hosting their first annual Mobile Health Competition. Applicants must submit an idea for a phone application that will help teenage cancer patients manage their condition and make their lives easier. To help pick the winning idea eyeforpharma have created their very own super panel, comprised of teenage cancer survivors and charitable bodies.

The competition is open to anyone working for a pharmaceutical company, advertising agency, healthcare organisation, as well as patients themselves. The winner will have the opportunity to develop their application and see it launched. They will also win $5,000, which they can donate to a cancer charity of their choice.

The Teenager Cancer Trust, PatientsLikeMe, LIVESTRONG Young Adult Alliance, and a host of other charitable, patient, and mobile specialist companies have partnered with eyeforpharma for the competition.

Here at Hive we welcome any initiatives aimed at improving patient care and engagement, so we urge you to get involved and spread the word.

The closing date for entries is January 3rd 2012. 

http://www.eyeforpharma.com/mobilehealth/

A few months ago, a new programme called Ngram Viewer graduated from Google labs. This tool, which sits within Google books, allows you to see how often phrases have occurred in the world’s books over the years. Google have digitalised over 15 million books, that’s almost 12% of all books ever published. With Ngram viewer you can now graph the occurrence of phrases up to five words in length from the year 1400 through to 2008 across 5.2 million books. With the Ngram Viewer you graph and compare phrases from these datasets over time, showing how their usage has waxed and waned over the years and rapidly quantifying cultural trends.

There are lots of different things you can check but you need to careful when interpreting your results. Experts warn that some effects are due to changes in the language we use to describe things (such as ‘The Great War’ vs. ‘World War I’). Others are due to actual changes in what interests us (‘slavery’ peaks during the Civil War and again during the era of the Civil Rights movement.)

So what can the Ngram viewer tell us about healthcare? Well it seems that the words ‘doctor’ and ‘hospital’ have had a similar cultural presence from 1800 to the present day. In comparison the use of the word ‘patient’ has steadily increased with a massive boost post-1950.  Most interesting is the word ‘health’, which had a huge cultural presence in the 1600s followed by a dramatic slump in the early 1700s. It’s been increasing ever since.

Go and try the tool yourself, or have a look at what other people have searched for on the Ngrams Tumblelog. 

Scoop.it, a tool that lets one and all hunt, gather and distribute content from around the Web launched publicly today after a year in an invite-only beta.

We were lucky enough to be one of the beta babes and we have been curating Patient Centricity News for a couple of months now.  Its dead straightforward, and is backed by a plum algorithm that once seduced helps you find relevant articles and videos. It cracked the automated pitfalls of death by junk content by leaving the curator to choose what’s right for them, and its this for me that has made the Scoop.it experience so fresh.

As “curation” becomes the next buzz word it been a joy to be part of the big beta crowd.  With more than 2 million visits per month, and traffic is growing by 35 percent month, we look forward to reviewing load more healthcare comms publications.