For
most of us there aren’t many things that Google and the internet can’t do. (Apart
from for my Granny who is still convinced she’s on the internet when playing
spider solitaire from the games tab of Windows ’98). Now, like an ancient Aztec
god, our online leader wants to find the secret to immortality. Ok, this might
be going a bit far, but Google’s latest initiative has high ambitions: to add
twenty years to the average human life span. Their philosopher’s stone? The
huge wealth of data Google holds combined with enhanced genomic information. In
a nutshell the aim is to take this genomic data, combine it with clinical data
and in turn produce personalised medical care. 

Google
have christened the new health programme “Calico”. I’m pretty sure this is a
fabric used for backing curtains and the like, but TIME
magazine claim it refers to a breed of cat. Cats have nine lives and Calico
attempts to extend life itself. The concept of “digital health” has been
growing for a while. A couple of months ago I did a little dig around the
wearable tech sector for one of our clients in relation to sport. I found loads
of things that were pushing tech far beyond simple fitness tracking. There was
a wealth of new gadgets to track our emotions, and indeed our physical health.
It turns out one of these “23andMe” is
actually owned by Google already. Their mission statement is to be: “the world's
trusted source of personal genetic information”. Basically they provide super
fast genetic testing via a small kit that could forewarn you of potential
problems.

[a 23andMe kit, not a Shewee]

Calico
takes this further. It wants to prolong our lives. According to this article:
“the new project will leverage Google’s massive cloud and data centres to help
facilitate research on disease and aging by mining its trove of data for
insight into their origins”. Sounds great doesn’t it? This could be used for
everything from type II diabetes to fighting cancer. But the author also makes
a good point in relation to the Google CEO: “Larry Page is brilliant, but his
message also seems to imply that diseases (and their cures) are reducible- that
all the world’s problems could be cured if we just had snappier algorithms.” I see
what he means. Tech can help us so much, but then we are not in the end always
fixable machines. You can’t just pop in a new battery. If only. I’m all for
anything that can improve people’s lives and reduce suffering, but new problems
are likely to rise from the ashes of this immortal phoenix.

Do
we even have the resources to cope with a population living twenty years longer? It
could get so overcrowded, especially on our own little island, that people will
be possessed by an ancient tribalism where they murder each other for the new
iPhone, let alone food: brother, get between me the till and that last packet
of hula hoops and I’ll taser you. Seventy year olds will be bench-pressing
200. Let’s face it a lot of Google’s wackier schemes are flashes in the dream
pan, but it will be interesting to see how this one develops.

[Thoughts
from Planning newbie Alexa]

Recently
I’ve been reading a lot about cognitive psychology and the way we can be primed
to make decisions based on certain cues. One of these is colour. In an
experiment people were asked to fill out a survey with either an orange or
green pen. They were then asked to pick an object from a large selection laid
out on a table. Some of these were orange. Some of these were green. But there
were a lot of other colours too. Low and behold those who’d used the green pen
picked a green object and the same happened for orange [Berger, J. &
Fitzsimons, G  2008]. Scary stuff. I
started to think about whether the same thing could be said for shapes.

We
learn to recognise shapes at an early age. You’re probably familiar with the
wooden box game where a toddler has to fit the cube through the square hole and
the cylinder through the circular hole and so on. I remember it was pretty satisfying
when you got it right. In this experiment it turns out young kids
actually find circles and squares much easier than triangles and rectangles.
Points are confusing. It doesn’t really say why a rectangle is harder than a
square, maybe it’s something to do with proportions and symmetry. In any case shape
recognition stabilises at around 6 years old but we’re still fascinated by them
as we get older. For instance studies have shown that men prefer women with a
waist to hip ratio of 0.7 (Waist Measurement ÷ Hip Measurement = Ratio), and women prefer men
with broad shoulders and a skinny waist that creates a V shaped torso. So this
is why superheroes have ridiculously tiny waists the diameter of my right
thigh. 

Shape
can also help the way we live, and not just by making things ergonomic. It’s a
way of categorising stuff. Take this innovative design by student Amanda
Savitzky. Her brother has Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). This condition makes
a hectic space like the kitchen a crazed sensory minefield.  He couldn’t cook for himself and was missing
out on the pleasure the rest of the family got from creating meals. So what’s
big sister done? She took the concept of some fancy French way of cooking
called ‘mise en place’ (which is a way of organising all your ingredients
before starting to cook) and used shape to make cooking steps accessible. Each
of the different shaped pans below is actually a measuring cup.  She then took lots of common recipes and
broke them down into cups. A red pentagon is one cup. A yellow square is half a
cup. Again colour is working with shape to help create a code. The recipes are
available on a specially designed app so her
brother could follow a guide step by step. It’s really snazzy. 

So
shape can make something useful. It helps us make the best use of a product. It
can also just make a product stand out. Take Toblerone. You could remove all
the text and branded colours on the bar below and you’d still be able to guess
what the object was. You’d know it was a Toberlone and not any other chocolate
bar. 

Shapes
are the perfect signals. Sexy shapes, solid shapes, see-through shapes, they
all help guide us, both as conscious tools and subconscious frames of
reference.

[Thoughts
from Planning newbie Alexa]