EP 67: Designing Health into Everyday Life | Steve Downs & Thomas Goetz

Is the everyday world making us sick? Can we hold companies
responsible for the health consequences of their products and
services? How do you design health into the operating systems of
our civilization? Steve Downs is a co-founder at Building H, a
project to build health into everyday life. Steve, his Building H
co-founder Thomas Goetz, and other collaborators are growing a
community of entrepreneurs, investors, designers, engineers and
researchers who believe that we need to re-imagine everyday
life—how we eat, sleep, get from place to place, socialize and
entertain ourselves—to be healthy by design. In addition to
community building, Building H and their collaborators are
developing tools to help companies understand the impacts of their
products and services on the health and well-being of their users.
Steve is a lecturer at the d.school at Stanford University
and an adjunct faculty member at the Interactive
Telecommunications Program (ITP) at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.
Prior to his role at Building H, he was the chief technology and
strategy officer at Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) where he
focused on the practice of program strategy and on the alignment of
the Foundation’s technology strategy and operations with its
organizational directions. Recognizing that RWJF’s pursuit of its
ambitious Culture of Health vision required an approach to strategy
that is highly flexible and adaptive, he led a transformation of
the Foundation’s approach to program strategy. Born in New
Hampshire, Steve earned an SM in technology and policy from the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a BS in physics and
applied physics from Yale University. Thomas Goetz is a journalist,
author and entrepreneur. He uses data, design, and stories to help
people understand and navigate complicated issues in their lives.
Thomas is the co-founder of Iodine, an award-winning website that
helps people make sense of their health and medicines. In 2016,
Iodine was acquired by GoodRx, America’s leading source for
prescription drug savings, where he presently serves as chief of
research. Thomas was previously the executive editor at WIRED,
which he led to a dozen National Magazine Awards in as many years,
and where he wrote dozens of cover stories on technology, science,
and medicine. He began his career as a reporter at the Village
Voice and the Wall Street Journal, and has written for the New York
Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and Bon Appetite. His writing has
been repeatedly selected for the Best American Science Writing and
Best Technology Writing anthologies. He served as the first
Entrepreneur-in-Residence for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation,
where he founded Flip the Clinic, an RWJ Signature Program working
to transform the practitioner-patient encounter. His 2010 TED talk
on visualizing medical data has been viewed more than half a
million times. He holds an MPH from UC Berkeley and a MA in
literature from UVA. Follow Steve on Twitter | LinkedIn Follow
Thomas on Twitter | LinkedIn This episode is sponsored by: Fortune
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