Building H #62: How to Build Something Useful
A 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.
13 amazing individuals showed up with a range of expertise and acumen: designers, coders, healthcare execs, tech nerds, MDs and MPHs. We started the night with a bit of humble history. After all, Building H started in 2013 with nothing more than an observation: Daily life is making us sick, not healthy.
It took us a while to turn that rather obvious observation (Public Health 101, btw!) into a more positive, if entirely absurd, idea: Could we perhaps make daily life into something healthy? Could we re-engineer the infrastructure of modern life?
Well, no - we couldn’t do that. But maybe we could help make it happen.
So we took that absurd idea and have tried to turn it into something actually useful. Could Building H create a toolbox that helps companies and creators build products and services that yield health instead of illness?
As toolboxes often do, this started with a hammer: the Building H Index, where we rank companies in target industries on how much health - or ill health - they produce. But a useful toolbox needs more than hammers, so we asked this amazing meetup group what other instruments might help. And with their help, we’ve got a couple other gadgets cooking up in the smith shop.
First is a notion to meet corporate America where it lives: in the land of KPIs and OKRs. How might we incentivize the actual makers of our world’s products to own the outcome of their products? What metrics could we insert - or recommend - to today’s builders and entrepreneurs that would help them build great, amazing products that *along the way* are also optimized for healthy outputs? This is a BIG endeavor and we only scratched the surface, with some ingenious ideas about building user preferences that actually align with health intentions and outcomes. But so many ideas! So much promise here!
Second, we lobbed a thought balloon that we could create a framework of “Healthy Design Principles”, akin to the Inclusive Design Principles or Sustainable Design Principles frameworks that have helped provide an actionable basis for effective design & product development towards those goals.
Again, we are still in the scraping-the-surface stage, but ideas like “Make the Healthy Choice Fun” and “Incentivize Connections (not Isolation)” seem very promising.
The clear takeaway from our SF Meetup was that there is a real hunger out there for this sort of toolbox. We can and must build this community. Moreover, we cannot preach health without selling the vision to those in the industries we intend to transform. We want to learn from experts who know the incentives and obstructions that compel the day-to-day builders, and we want to create a toolbox that works for them, as well as for the true believers.
It sounds like a kind-of absurd idea. But so did Building H in the first place.
Thank you to that baker’s dozen who joined us in early June in San Francisco. (It was so great to see you!) And this is just the start: based on other input, we’ll be taking these meetups on the road - LA, Boston, NYC, you are on the list. This community is growing fast, and the ideas are boiling over.
If you want us to visit a city near you, let us know!
- Thomas & Steve
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