Why New Haven?

Thought I would take this opportunity to explain what I'm actually doing in the marvellous hamlethood of New Haven. The number of times people have asked me "so... why New Haven??" with a very confused look on their face is too many to count- to give a bit of perspective to Kiwis, a very well travelled local described it to me as "the Palmerston North of Conneticut". Conneticut is perhaps the equivalent of Clevedon crossed with Wairoa. yea.. it still confuses me too.

So... here it is.

About 18months ago, I became aware of an organisation called Unite for Sight, who provide eye-care surgeries for communities around the globe, particularly in Ghana. What is unique about this particular organisation is that they also do a lot of research in global health practice and implementation on a wider scale. They run a Global Health and Innovation Conference every year which over 2,000 people attend at Yale University, and are based in New Haven

It's an area that interested me, and over about a year's worth of email correspondance, I decided to come over and work in their head office for a few months. I had been looking to go on a bit of an adventure, and figuring that I didn't know a single person on the entire American continent was even more of a reason to go, I traded in a beautiful NZ summer for New England winter.

The area I am currently focusing on is Health Related technologies- I spend my days going through case studies, evaluating research that has been done into the development and implementation of effective designing for health. I think its cool.

If this sounds at all interesting to any of you folks, here are a few links which you may (or may not) like to follow. Your choice.

Unite for Sight
Millenium Village Project
Medic Mobile
ColaLife A really interesting example of combining coke and medicine

This next video is so worth watching if you have a spare 15mins- sums everything up perfectly. I can't work out how to embed it, but the link should work...

Kevin Starr- IIT Design Research Conference

Just a bit of a disclaimer thing (in italics to prove its officialness!)
anything I'm writing in this blog is my own personal opinion, and in no way represents the views of any organisation, company, individual, animal, material, plant... I'm only 20yo people- 50% of the stuff I write makes no sense whatsoever, and the other half is rubbish. Enjoyable rubbish i hope, but rubbish nonetheless.