Our biggest project at Building H is the Building H index. Last April, our index ranked and rated products and services from 37 companies on how they affect the health of their customers. The report got great national coverage, with Fast Company covering the release and the issue of how the product environment affects public health. We were also pleased that many of the companies we profiled engaged in the process as well.
And now: time for the next edition of the Index!
This edition of the newsletter is like a reverse mullet: a party up front, and all business in the back.
First, the party!
We’re thrilled to announce two in-person Building H meet-ups next month in New York and Boston to get input, ideas, and share progress on our Healthy Design Principles.
Please join us! You can sign up on Eventbrite for Wednesday November 2 in Brooklyn or Wednesday November 9 in Boston.
Read MoreIn an article for Slate, Building H co-founder Steve Downs looks at the enduring influence of The Jetsons, a cartoon sitcom launched in 1962. The Jetsons gave us a vision of technology could shape our world — it gave us flying cars, moving sidewalks, robot maids, and even nuclear-powered dogs. Implicit in this vision was that technology would utter in a lifestyle of exceptional convenience — everything could be summoned or performed with the touch of a button or a simple voice command.
Read MoreEmbedded cultural assumptions about how technology will shape our lives has had profound consequences for our health. Steve makes this argument in an article posted this morning in Slate: The Jetsons, Now 60 Years Old, Is Iconic. That’s a Problem. He uses the 60th anniversary of the cartoon sitcom to reflect on the world its creators envisioned, the enduring influence that vision has had, the lifestyles that resulted, and the need for new visions in which technology supports the everyday behaviors that humans need to thrive.
Read MoreLife expectancy in the US is down again, according to a new report released by the National Center for Health Statistics. Overall life expectancy dropped nearly three years – from 79 to 76 – over the last two years, the largest two-year drop in 100 years.
Read MoreMark Zuckerberg is betting his company, Meta (née Facebook), on the “metaverse,” a concept he has been trying to explain to people. (His visual examples have not fared so well). According to Zuckerberg, “'A lot of people think that the metaverse is about a place, but one definition of this is it's about a time when basically immersive digital worlds become the primary way that we live our lives and spend our time.”
Read MoreAt Building H, our very name suggests that we need to, you know, BUILD something to achieve health. But part of our hypothesis has always been that an essential part of a healthy environment is the outdoors - that our time spent in the built environment and the product environment need to be countered with time in nature.
Read MoreLast week Apple released an unexpected, 60-page report that sums up their health efforts, which have been building up over the last eight years. It was unexpected because Apple usually makes news by introducing new products or reporting on financial performance. So it’s not clear why they released it, but in any case, it provides a good overview of both the range and the coherence of their work to improve health.
Read MoreWe talk a lot at Building H about the ways that modern life affects our health-related behaviors. One of the biggest casualties of the modern lifestyle is cooking dinner at home, which has been on a long slow decline. (See Amanda Mull’s excellent “How America Lost Dinner” for a rundown of the many factors involved.)
Read MoreWe’re excited to share the results of a speculative design project we supported with students from the University of Washington’s Human-Centered Design and Engineering department. Aichen Sun, Eeshani Mondal, Elen Liu and Samrudha Malandkar have created deliz, a speculative design for a service that makes it easy and fun for people to cook at home.
Read MoreGetting outdoors is good for people – it can lower stress levels, lower blood pressure and heart rate, increase immune function, help align circadian rhythms (and thus lead to better sleep), build stronger bones and even reduce myopia in children. It’s an important – if often overlooked – health behavior.
Read MoreSo much of our economy is based on the challenge of figuring out what consumers want and then delivering the products and services that meet those demands. But how do we know what people want?
Read MoreA couple weeks ago, Steve and Thomas invited folks in the San Francisco area to join us in an office across from South Park for a face-to-face, in-person, real-life, here-and-now, bonafide meetup. Like one of those pre-2020 things where people interested in one something “meet up” to talk and share ideas.
It was awesome.
We’ve long argued that to improve the public’s health, we need a product environment (i.e. the products and services that shape our everyday behaviors) that is healthy by design. And that achieving this outcome will take leadership: collective intention and collective will, in both the private and public sectors. Two stories in this edition speak to the challenges and possibilities of engaging that leadership and marshaling the resources to achieve positive social impact.
Read MoreWhile public health has often looked to public policy as primary tool for tackling major health challenges, we’ve generally taken a different tack with Building H. Our focus is on the product environment – how the product and services of everyday life shape the behaviors that affect people’s health. We seek to catalyze innovation in products and services that make it easier to lead healthier lives and create transparency and accountability for the impacts that businesses have on their customers. But while we don’t focus on policy, there is often an important interplay among technological innovation, policy and infrastructure and nowhere is this more evident than in the field of mobility…
Read MoreWe all know that cooking dinner is tough, especially for people with busy lives. It’s no wonder that we turn to DoorDash or pick up a prepared, ready-to-eat meal. But what if we could make it easier to cook? And faster, and more fun?
Read MoreLast week Eli Lilly reported some impressive trial results for tirzepatide, its new weight-loss drug. Patients reportedly lost an average of 22.5% of body weight, or more than 50 pounds on average. Between tirzepatide and Novo Nordisk’s semaglutide (aka Wegovy), which had similar (if not quite as powerful) results, it appears that there will be good pharmacological options for the treatment of obesity.
Read Morewe’re excited to launch the 2022 Building H Index - a ranking of 37 of America’s best known companies on how their products and services affect human health, everyday. It’s a new way to think about How Health Happens.
What does that mean? How did we do it?
Read MoreWe’re delighted to announce that Building H has become a project of the Public Health Institute. The Public Health Institute (PHI) has an auspicious 50+-year history of supporting public health leaders and innovators through acting as a fiscal sponsor and incubator of nonprofit efforts to improve public health.
Read MoreWe worked with Hopelab and some of their partners to ask young people about how they define health, how to build it into everyday life and the role of technology in shaping their health. All of the content, which focuses heavily on video interviews, from this exploration is now available on the Building H website.
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