Moderator Tom Paulson with the Humanosphere blog, kicked off the session by saying the global health narrative is narrow and clichéd and the media has not moved into serious coverage of issues, such as controversies and fights over power. But he challenged attendees: “We can change the narrative of global health with social media.”
Speakers included Lauren Dunnington, with the International Training and Education Center for Health or I-TECH, the largest center within UW’s Department of Global Health; A. Teaque Lenahan with frog, a global innovation company; and Adam Pellegrini with WorldDoc.
Lenahan’s presentation really intrigued me because this company, which stands for Federal Republic of Germany, is a huge thinker of global challenges.
Frog was started 40 years ago and helped put Apple on the map. Lenahan’s talk was unlike other presentations. He knew how to capture an audience. He had video, great graphics, and talked about things like motivational design. .
frog helped the Nike Foundation try to connect 100m girls around the world.
He shared two projects frog was working on. One was for the Nike Foundation, which wanted help connecting 100m girls around the world starting with 30 13-year-olds in Kibera, Kenya. The project, girleffect.org, involved spending several weeks in Kibera to see what girls thought would work and spread. The idea, still in the works, is using cell phone technology and tapping into the power of Girl Scouts for ideas.. The other was for Cleveland Clinic, which wanted to become a digital hipster like the Mayo Clinic but didn’t have a progressive social media culture. Lenahan said one creation they designed for the old-school clinic is called “The Atrium,” a place to collect patient stories online.
On the website, what they did for Cleveland Clinic would be called frogThink. “We deploy frogThink at moments of clarity and confusion to create alignment, to generate new and innovative ideas, and to escape the paralysis that’s all too common in corporate cultures.”
Frog was founded in 1969 by designer Hartmut Esslinger around the maxim “form follows motion.” The firm has been instrumental in the design of Louis Vuitton luggage, the flat screen Sony Trinitron, colorful frollerskates, flexible workstations, and, in 1984, the Apple computer.
Lenahan said. frog builds on emotions as a foundation and unlocks the power of communities. “We want to find out what motivates people,” he said.
In fact, all the speakers focused on thinking outside the box in a somewhat smaller way. Dunnington helped show how building a functioning library is critical in solving global health problems and Pelligrini is behind a company that started a Facebook app “Jamajic 360” to monitor disaster risk, establish “Lifeline” relationships and post emergency information to a subscriber’s wall.
I, personally, would love to be a fly on the wall at frog.
– Bobbi Nodell
