What can you do if you’re part of the 92 percent of Americans without Herculean willpower? How can you successfully make a healthy lifestyle change in 2013?

The answer might surprise you. Start with a micro-adjustment in your existing routine – it’s guaranteed to improve your health and it costs nothing. You could be doing it right now.

It’s called standing. And it’s something we should all do more of this year.

Sitting, as every ergonomist knows, is hazardous to our health. Yet most of us sit all day — at work, in a car or on the couch watching a movie or a ballgame.

Sitting slows our metabolism. It’s been linked to heart attacks and diabetes, kidney disease and cancer.  Just two hours of sitting per day can drop good cholesterol by 20 percent and reduce blood flow.

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One of this month’s fabricating duos, Jason Pilarski and Steven Joyner of Machine Histories, often works with fine artists to figure out how to bring their larger-than-life pieces into the world.  Their 2009 effort for artist David Schafer, Separated United Forms, was part of a 1% for the Arts commission for the Huntington Hospital in Pasadena and encapsulates the intricacies of their tech-meets-manual approach.  Schafer, an NEA-award recipient whose work has been shown at PS1 and De Vleeshal in the Netherlands, talks about the pair of sculptures:

Jade Chang: You and Jason taught a class together at Art Center?

David Schafer: Yes, it was a moment at Art Center where there was an opportunity to develop a new kind of interdisciplinary curriculum.  I was frustrated with Art Center because there was a Fine Art program, but no way to allow them to have access to the digital side of things.  Jason and I taught digital practices and sculpture. It was not market driven, instead, it was more or less taught from an art perspective. Students could bring in own conceptual ideas, they wouldn’t have to design a blender or anything, and they’d learn rapid prototyping machines and 3D modeling.  We had fine art-style crits—the kind that go on and on—to discuss their work.

JC: And how did you meet Steven, the other half of Machine Histories?

DS: The three of us came together in that class.  Steve was really brilliant.  They just had lots of energy, and the class became a platform for these things to evolve and develop.  It was great to have fine arts students in the class with transportation design students, product design, to discuss everything from product theory to appropriation. Steve is definitely the one that’s the most organized.  He does go to great lengths to make the greatest looking racking to hold something—he gets as excited about the case as the thing in it.

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How can architects expand Western science and medicine into parts of the world with different cultural and traditional values?

Western designers have been designing healthcare facilities across the world since colonial times. For centuries, the flow of medical knowledge — as with the flow of military and financial power — was one-sided. But over the past two decades, as medicine became an important Western export, the world has become flat and this knowledge transfer has turned into a two-way street.

Today, we are participating in the globalization of Western medicine – its science, commerce, and philosophical underpinnings. We see evidence of the regionalization of the delivery of Western medicine with leading healthcare brands such as Johns Hopkins, Harvard Medical International, and The Cleveland Clinic placing their facilities and operations in emerging regions. The healthcare environments that Western architects are designing in Asia Pacific, the Middle East, and India are becoming living laboratories for global cultural integration.

This trend is forcing the convergence of scientific treatment with culturally responsive delivery. I call this “bridging the empathy gap.” By this I mean that we must hear what our clients in the countries where we work are not telling us and see what they are not showing us. We need to decipher their hidden messages.

Here are three stories that reveal how even subtle cultural differences can significantly impact the design of hospitals.

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For the past ten years, evidence has been collecting in publications and exhibits that a new field of practice is emerging. It uses design as a tool to serve the public, including those who cannot afford design services. And it’s becoming clear that we now have a movement, not just a collection of well-documented projects and well-meaning people.  This is a new field of practice. The name that best describes it as a profession is public interest design. While many other catchy and descriptive names have been used such as community design, social impact, humanitarian, and pro bono, only public interest design bears the systemic permanence of a profession.

As this term enters the public discourse, will it be used by anybody to mean anything? Or, are there professional standards that need to be defined and understood – especially by the public – if this quickly emerging field is to make the valuable contribution that it can?

We don’t have to look very far into the past to see why clarity and definition are essential. Just ten years ago, “green design” could be falsely applied to anything; therefore it became almost meaningless. The term only acquired meaning when professional performance standards were defined.

Here it’s useful to look at other emerging professions and the steps necessary when these professions passed through similar moments of creation.

Doctor injecting a patient with placebo as part of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, photo via wikipedia originally sourced from the US National Archives.

Take public interest health, for example. In 1932 the U.S. Public Health Service started a study of rural low-income men in Tuskegee, Alabama, who had syphilis. The 600 men involved thought they were receiving free health care, but in reality they were just being monitored like lab rats. When penicillin was discovered as a cure in 1947, the study continued for another 25 years without ever treating the men as patients, allowing many to die awful deaths and infect family members. Those conducting the study considered it to be in the public’s interest; and the last director went to his grave never acknowledging that ethical mistakes were made.

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So just what does an illustrator do at the Mayo Clinic?

In the seven weeks since I started my Maharam STEAM Fellowship at the Mayo Clinic Center for Innovation. I’ve been asked that question by a lot of people. The good news is, I’m finding new answers to it every day. I’m a little more than half way done with my time here and already I’ve shadowed midwives and doctors, acted as a graphic facilitator for patients, taught med students about the importance of visual communication, and made comics illustrating brand new methods of care. That’s not even mentioning the things I’ve done outside the walls of Mayo where I’ve single-handedly eaten my first batch of fried cheese curds, admired tons of massive farm equipment proudly parading down main street, and been pelted by pounds of overripe tomatoes the at Midwest Tomato Fest. Given the nature of my outside-of-work activities, it’s impressive that my work within the clinic has been the most exciting part of these seven weeks.

I began my fellowship with a more traditional illustration job. Working with the Practice Redesign team, I completed a series of images that were embedded in customized education videos intended to communicate surgical procedures to patients. These videos are part of a larger experiment that aims to rethink the outpatient experience, reduce healthcare costs by 30%, and simultaneously improve patient satisfaction. While the idea of an illustrator doing medical illustration is not surprising, I was surprised by the way my team immediately treated me as a professional illustrator. I wasn’t told what to draw and then sent off to a dark corner to crank it out. Instead, I read through video scripts, decided for myself where and if a visual was needed, defined what that visual should be, and then created it. I’d never felt so valued in a professional setting as an illustrator. You can see a screenshot from my project here.

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I never thought that a place like the Mayo Clinic Center for Innovation (CFI) could exist in the real world. Yet, as I found out, radical collaborations happen every day here.

Though everyone talks about how great cross-disciplinary collaboration is, in reality, the difficulties of getting two completely different sets of people to speak the same language, much less to collaborate fruitfully, often keeps such visions from being realized.  At the CFI, Monday through Friday, a team of designers—graphic, industrial, and service—come together with doctors, nurses, and healthcare providers to ask difficult questions and to bring a new vision of the future to life.  And now, thanks to the Maharam STEAM fellowship, one illustrator has joined their ranks.

The Maharam STEAM fellowship supports students like myself from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) who have proposed a unique internship with a government agency or nonprofit organization to explore the ways in which art and design can improve public policy. The fellowship comes out of the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) to STEAM initiative (STEM+ Art = STEAM), which advocates for federal and societal support for the arts along side the sciences.

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