The curse of the systems thinker is that one is always seeing patterns, always searching for the fundamental forces and dynamics that underlie a system and give rise to the peculiar results one sees. One is always – as we like to say in public health – looking upstream, for the root causes – and even their root causes. It’s hard to stay focused on the immediate problems at hand, when there are deeper, more fundamental causes of those problems that are – most perplexing to the systems thinker – so deeply embedded that they are rendered nearly invisible, or at least taken for granted. They are the givens, the fixed conditions that exist outside the solution space.

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Spending time outdoors. It’s one of the five behaviors we use in our Building H Index framework to assess how products and services influence the health of their users. But let’s be honest – it’s not one of the more recognizable health behaviors like diet and physical activity. Yet we care about it because it does have significant health impacts. Spending time outdoors – and in nature – has been linked to a growing list of health benefits from lower blood pressure to avoiding myopia.

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As regular readers know,  Building H developed a rating system — the Building H Index — that measures the affects of products on their consumers. It’s a 1-100 scale where 50 and above can be considered a “good” score - a net positive for human health - and below 50 would be a “bad” score, or a net negative for health.  We released the last index this past October, and we’ve been looking for ways to make it even more impactful. One idea: Might our Index be something that investors might use in evaluating their portfolios - especially so-called socially responsible investing?

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There’s been a recent spate of commentaries arguing that we’re on the verge of artificial general intelligence (AGI, in the current jargon). New York Times tech reporter Kevin Roose wrote recently, in his piece Powerful A.I. Is Coming. We’re Not Ready: “I believe that very soon — probably in 2026 or 2027, but possibly as soon as this year — one or more A.I. companies will claim they’ve created an artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., which is usually defined as something like “a general-purpose A.I. system that can do almost all cognitive tasks a human can do."

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Self-driving cars have been the future for some time now. They have followed the Gartner Hype Cycle in predictable fashion, peaking several years back when we could extrapolate the progress to perfection and before a few highly publicized fatal accidents, after which their apparent lack of progress seemed to consign them to the realm of revolutions that weren’t. But, true to Gartner, they’ve been steadily working their way up the Slope of Enlightenment in the form of self-driving taxis in large cities.

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Wellness is back! With your personal life coach and raw milk subscription and supplements regimen, you are on the vanguard of the new age of personal health empowerment. And now everyone’s favorite wellness guru, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is poised to take over as Secretary of Health and Human Services. We live in the healthiest of times. And - oh yeah - the unhealthiest of times, with chronic disease at record levels and all the trend lines going the wrong way.

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Ever since limes and sauerkraut were discovered as cures and preventatives for scurvy in the 18th century, food has been leveraged as a powerful tool for preventing disease and advancing health. In the 20th century, supplemented foods - adding iodine to sale, boosting milk with vitamin D, even adding fluoride to public water systems - created huge public health benefits, turning the ubiquity of mass-consumed foodstuffs to prevent common diseases.

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How might we reimagine online grocery services to be healthy by design? We wanted to explore this question, so we challenged a team of graduate students from the Master of Human-Computer Interaction and Design program at the University of Washington, to create a speculative service design. The result: Social Grocer.

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