I was asked by my colleague a few weeks ago to create a poster for our (his really) Work-In-Progress submission to CHI 2011. I obviously agreed, but soon found myself feeling restricted. Most posters I’ve seen suck. They’re boring, contain too much text, and don’t have any color. They all seem to follow the tired ABSTRACT, METHODS, DATA, CONCLUSION format. So instead of fighting this, I threw it all out and developed something I could really call my own.

Hector’s Poster:

I think it’s fairly straight forward and to the point. Concepts are modularized, labeled, and directed. And it’s nice on the eyes. Unfortunately, it wasn’t submitted.

Colleague’s Poster:

My colleague submitted his version instead. I’ll let it speak for itself. His reasoning:

I Really liked what you did for the poster but I chose mine because 1) it conformed better to what I think is expected, and 2) didn’t feel liking adding a lot of text to yours.

So my question is: What exactly is expected? Conformity? The only requirements CHI makes regarding a poster is its dimensions. They say nothing else. Wouldn’t ACM CHI, the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, be the most accepting venue for this sort of thing? Needless to say, I am disappointed with his decision. I’m going to print this poster out anyway. It’s probably the last academic writing I will ever do. HGP

This is how we should communicate medical lab data: so it can be understood. This particular design for Prostate-specific Antigen was by JUNG + WENIG, and was my favorite of the three, particularly because theirs included a clearly labeled sequence for digesting the information. Designs were commissioned by Wired for their The Blood Test Gets a Makeover article.

On an ironic side note, The NNT states that 100% of PSA test subjects received no benefit from the test, and that 20% were actually harmed due to false-positives. Yikes. HGP

The Center for Research on IT and Organizations (CRITO) and the Center for Health Care Management and Policy (CHCMP), both at UC Irvine, teamed up to deliver this excellent conference that covered many aspects of new health today. It’s definitely one of the better conferences I’ve been to.

Interesting people and things mentioned:

• Dr. Eric Topol of Scripps Health tweets about wireless health monitoring, personal genomics, and how these will change medicine. He’s a great presenter too. Check him out @EricTopol.
• Research from MIT shows that your social network is capable of changing your health behaviors. Original work was published in Science.
• DNA Transistors mentioned as a World Changing Idea by Scientific American.
• The Number Needed to Treat (NNT) is a powerful tool to communicate benefit and harm that both patients and doctors can understand. The number of treatments that don’t benefit us is shocking!
• Jitterbug is a phone aimed at seniors. The company is venturing into all sorts of health services and monitoring. Originally conceived by the inventor of the mobile phone, Marty Cooper. (Check out this mostly unrelated, but awesome interview he did with CSPAN)

Questions I wanted to ask, but didn’t get an chance to:

• If preventative health will be consumer-driven, how do we create demand? Many chronic disease sufferers are apathetic or ignorant to the the harmful effects of their illness. Technology has been shown to influence behavior, but how do we expect these consumers to understand this need before they buy?
• How do medical and health device companies expect to merge systems and solutions if their products continue to use propriety and/or undocumented systems for data exchange and storage? It’s my data. Let me access it how I want and send it where I want to!

This conference, along with some other recent events, have shown me I prefer pen to paper for most of my activities! I’ll take better notes next time. HGP