We’ve been on a bit of a hiatus while focusing our attention on the 2024 Building H Index, which we’re getting ready to release in the next few weeks. The Index has been a massive project: our team has rigorously researched and analyzed more than 75 products and services across 12 project categories in four industries – citing nearly 400 sources in the process.

The controversial social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has a new book coming out entitled The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. Haidt excerpts the book in his article, “End the Phone-Based Childhood Now,” in The Atlantic. In it, Haidt steps back and describes the enormous transformation that has occurred in the experience of childhood and links it to dramatic negative shifts in mental health, social connection and academic achievement, along with declines in dating, sexual activity, and teenage employment.

Adam Rogers begins his piece Bike lanes are good for business by noting the knee-jerk and not unreasonable fear that many small business owners have about adding bike lanes to downtown streets. They, of course, worry that the attendant removal of parking spaces will make it harder for customers to reach them by car, and anything that limits vehicle access to their stores will cut into their sales. It all makes sense, except, as Rogers shows quite clearly in the article, it’s wrong.

In case you missed it, Apple’s new Vision Pro went on sale earlier this month and our feeds are now awash in hot takes about what it is, what it does, and how much it matters. When it was first announced in June, we wrote about it with some curiosity, a bit of awe and no small amount of apprehension (see Building H #84: Brave New Face). 

"In America, there is widespread acceptance among businessmen of the handful of general ethical principles,” wrote Baumhart. “But between these general principles (such as 'Thou shalt not steal') and the concrete problems of the businessman (such as whether or not price-fixing is stealing from customers), a wide gap appears." 

The original coffee houses were, by design, people places: a space to meet, to talk, to play board games, to listen to stories or music. Appearing first in the Middle East in the 15th century, they were widespread throughout Europe by the 1600s, bustling with political and artistic debate, card games and chess tables, and deal-making.

ARPA-H, the federal agency charged with “supporting the development of high-impact solutions to society's most challenging health problems,” released a request for ideas for its Ethical, Legal, and Social Implication’s (ELSI) Initiative. We took a moment to share our thoughts.

In their book User Friendly, Cliff Kuang and Robert Fabricant asked a provocative question: what if, instead of its operating system being organized by apps, the iPhone had been built around social relationships? Inspired by this question, we challenged a team of students in the Master of Human-Computer Interaction and Design at the University of Washington to create a speculative design that would flesh out that possibility.

For years after Alan Turning proposed what he called “the imitation game” in 1950, the so-called Turning Test stood as an formidable challenge for artificial intelligence. The test was defined in various ways over the decades, but the basic idea was perfectly simple: Could an artificial intelligence pass as a human in ordinary dialogue?

Two weeks back, the New York Times had a stunning scoop: a bunch of Silicon Valley billionaires had bought 50,000 acres midway between San Francisco and Sacramento with the ambition of turning farmland and scrub into a dynamic new city of 100,000 or more.

Steve and our longtime collaborator (and member of our advisory group) Sara Singer have a new paper out in the American Journal of Health Promotion. In “The ‘Product Environment’ is an Important Driver of Health. It’s Time to Measure It,” Sara and Steve introduce the term “product environment” into the academic literature, defining it as the “the constellation of products and services with which people regularly interact.”

To live in urban America in 2023 is to bear witness, every day, to our collective failure to build enough houses for people to live in. Today’s housing shortage is a crisis 50 years in the making - a history that we won’t get into here - but it means that, nationwide, the US is behind by nearly 4 million houses, according to a 2021 Freddie Mac analysis.

One of our core aims at Building H is to see more and more commercial products that make it easier for people to live healthy lives — to eat well, move physically, sleep longer and better, engage socially and spend time outdoors and in nature. We look closely at how new technologies tend to shape these behaviors (see our last edition, for example) and raise concerns when the tech and product trends push in the opposite direction… So we were excited to see a number of recent stories that point to commercial efforts aimed at facilitating these healthy behaviors.