Category: society

community, creativity, social change, society, technology

Beautiful: Robots Set to Become Important Members of Our Communities

Christa Avampato
Say hello to NAO

Last week I watched the movie Robot & Frank. The movie follows the story of Frank, an aging, slightly-reformed thief who is facing dementia-like symptoms. Divorced with adult children who have busy lives of their own, Frank (portrayed brilliantly and powerfully by actor Frank Langella) fights against being moved to a nursing facility. Though the movie takes place in the not-too-distant future, several significant leaps in technology have been made. One of these leaps involves creating robots who serve as caretakers to the aging. Frank’s son buys him one of these skilled-care robots and so begins Frank’s sweet, bizarre, and tangled friendship with his robot who records Frank’s every move, including his return to crime.

Think it’s far-fetched for robots to play the critical role of senior caretaker? Think again.

Earlier this week, Fast Company ran an article about the NAO humanoid robot. Though invented about 5 years ago, it is now available commercially and helps autistic children in schools. Why has a robot proven effective with autistic children? Interaction with other people is a key challenge for many people, adults and children, who have autism. Because robots have predictable behaviors (after all, we program them and they can only do what we tell them to do) and offer far less stimuli during interactions than humans, people with autism can relate well to them.

The days of personal robots are quickly moving from the dreams of science fiction writers to members of our society. With the collaborative vision and determination of programmers, designers, and product developers, they may well be the  critical component to solving some of the greatest social challenges in our society. To take a peek at videos of the NAO humanoid robot at work, click here.

adventure, social change, society, technology

Leap: Social Good Summit Day #1 Highlights

Christa Avampato

We need to create our own solutions. Technology gives us a way to rise up and speak for ourselves.” ~ TMS “Teddy” Ruge, Co-Founder, Project Diaspora

TMS created the rally cry of the passionate individuals who are coming together from all over the world for the Social Good Summit. The first day of the event brought a giant wave of excitement and possibility for the use of technology to solve the world’s greatest social challenges. From health to education to environmental conservation, enthusiastic and insightful individuals across the globe are banding together with others to conceive of solutions and bring them to life.

Data is only useful when applied for the public good
With election season upon us, we’re bombarded by sparring matches, claims of past actions, and future promises. Here’s my biggest question: Where is the innovation in government? And today I got my answer.

In Washington, Todd Park, U.S. CTO and Assistant to the President for Tech, is leading the passionate charge by unlocking previously unusable data and making it downloadable by third parties who use it to build, in his words, “awesomeness”.  The federal government is hosting hackathons to ignite and unite appliers, people who want to take that data and build something that helps others.

The innovations coming from these hackathons are incredible and you can take a look at the examples at data.gov. My favorite example is iTriage, a mobile app and website that gives users the ability to plug int their symptoms and their location, and find out the closest place for them to receive the right care at the right time. The results: it’s saving lives, creating jobs, and improving healthcare delivery, all from publicly available data filtered for individual use.

Women and girls get a voice and advocate
Jill Sheffield of Women Deliver made the case that supporting women and girls around the globe isn’t just the right thing to do, but the smart thing to do. Globally, we lose $15B of productivity every year because of unwanted pregnancies and pregnancy complications. Nearly all of this expense can be eliminated by utilizing technology to teach reproductive education to the 3 billion young people around the world who are under 25.

If women can’t plan their fertility, then they can’t plan their lives. How they plan their lives affects how the world evolves. By making women and girls the center of the development conversation, we can craft policies, programs, and actions to alleviate poverty more effectively.

Google Earth to the rescue
If a picture is worth a thousand words and knowledge is power, then Google Earth is the greatest powerhouse for social change ever created. Rebecca Moore brilliantly and expertly illustrated how Google Earth is being used to remove land mines, help indigenous tribes protect the rain forests, stop dangerous mountain top mining, and end genocide. It is used to influence policy, empower local communities, and raise philanthropic funds on a global scale.

If you thought Google was just for search, think again. It’s fast becoming a synonym for conscience, safety, peace, preservation, and community. In Rebecca’s words, “It’s going to be a great adventure.” More info at Google Earth Engine.

Tomorrow the Summit will kick off at 1pm Eastern. View the livestream here and follow the conversation on Twitter with the hashtag #SGSGlobal.

art, change, charity, nonprofit, photographs, poverty, relationships, social change, society

Beginning: Hear the Hungry Benefit with Featured Artist J.T. Liss Raises Funds to Provide A Supportive Community for New York City’s Homeless

Christa Avampato

On Monday night I attended a fundraiser at Webster Hall for a start-up nonprofit called Hear the Hungry. The group’s mission is to bring “food, companionship, and other basic necessities to the homeless in New York and L.A.” I am especially moved by their holistic mission because of a recent experience I had with the homeless in my own neighborhood while I was taking a walk with my pup, Phineas. Yes, we need food, but we also need a compassionate ear to hear us and a generous heart to sit with us for a while. Hear the Hungry is providing this unique and badly needed service in our city, for a population that is largely stepped over, ignored, or just plain invisible to too many of us.

Events like this are powerful reminders of how much of an impact we can have at every turn if only we recognize our own power in every exchange we have. The day after the event I walked through my usual activities much more conscious of my interactions with others, particularly those who I didn’t know. It made me think about how important it is to be present with others, to give them our full attention, and to recognize their unique value.

Two Ways You Can Help:

Hear the Hungry
In its one year, Hear the Hungry has changed the lives of the homeless through compassion, trust, and the firm belief that all people deserve the opportunity to belong to a supportive and loving community. If you’d like to learn more about them and get involved in their mission, find them on Twitter, Facebook, and at their blog.

Photography For Social Change
Through his initiative Photography for Social Change, photographer J.T. Liss creates stunning, poignant images with the goals of “inspiring advocacy, helping others in need, and allowing art to spread positivity.” 25% of the proceeds from all photos sold will go to unique nonprofit organizations that are striving to help others in need. Current partner organizations include Hear The Hungry (NYC), Hug It Forward (CA), and Saint Joseph Music Program (NYC).

For more information on J.T. and Photography for Social Change, please visit and “Like” his Facebook Page.

communication, design, learning, nature, science, society, technology

Beginning: A Lesson from Biomimicry – Looking Around and Get Your Knees Dirty

Christa Avampato

From Treehugger.com
I went to an incredible panel yesterday about biomimicry and its implications for the design of technology projects. The talk was put together by several key personalities in this space. If you are curious about bioIogy or design or both, I highly recommend taking a look at Biomimicry.net and Beedance.com. Representatives of both organizations were represented on the panel.

At the end of the panel Holly Harlan of E4S and Michael Dungan of Beedance said two very profound points that have stuck with me since the panel and I think they hold very important pieces of advice for living, particularly for people passionate about technology. Holly said that if we’re really curious about design, really interested in learning from nature then we need to dig around in the dirt. It’s all well and good to read and research and ask questions of others. It’s necessary, though the greatest learning is found through our own personal exploration of the physical world. Michael encouraged us to put down our devices, unplug, and look around. Really see what’s happening in our natural environment. It sounds so simple and yet the world is whizzing by us at a dizzying pace while we remain glued to our glowing screens.

I found these two pieces of info particularly poignant last night at the Foursquare party. I was with some friends from work and we were having a great time dancing and enjoying a really beautiful and balmy Texas evening. As I took a look around, I was blown over by the number of people who were with other people but not present. Every 30 seconds they were on their mobiles, half listening to the people talking to them, lost in some digital experience of some kind. It made me wonder and start to worry about what all of these devices are really doing to our personal awareness. Despite constantly being in the know, constantly being “connected”, flooded with information on every conceivable subject, we seem to be in a fog of our own design. Existing, though not living. We really may be entirely disconnected from our own intuition and from others.

I’ll be the first to say I love technology and its potential for good. I love piles of information. I love design. I also love, in equal if not greater proportion, the trees, the grass, and the sky. I have yet to come across any piece of technology that wows me more than something that the natural world has created from its own immense intelligence and experience. To design as nature designs is the ideal, is the genius we’re all so desperately looking for. To take in its teachings requires dirty knees and a clear mind. I’m making a vow to unplug more often, get out into the world with more compassion than ever before, and live. I hope you’ll join me.

community, society

Step 138: Invest in Others

Christa Avampato

“We are each other’s harvest; we are each other’s business; we are each other’s magnitude and bond.” ~ Gwendolyn Brooks

As the weather gets milder, I’m spending more time on my terrace. I stare up at all of those stars, and they remind me that the world has a lot of room for glowing. I really hate that term “top performers”, the idea that the world takes shape on a bell curve with us as nothing more than points on that path, grouped in standard deviations from the mediocre mean. Ridiculous. If the universe in its infinite wisdom thought that way about the galaxy, I would spend my nights gazing into a black, empty sky, with hardly any light.

Everyone has within them the opportunity to display extraordinary abilities. Our only real work consists of bringing out that glimmer in ourselves, and in those around us. We owe it equally to ourselves, to those with us now, to those who came before us, and those who will follow. I for one would rather leave a legacy of light than a legacy inscribed with the idea of “I did what was rational, safe, and standard.” I would rather believe that by changing expectations, I can change performance. I would rather spend my days chasing down my own unlikely dream than abiding by someone else’s rules and standards.

I invest in people before I invest in the stock market. When push comes to shove, I double down on my own efforts and I don’t bank on a better opportunity to magically appear. I have to build the better opportunity, for myself and for others as my responsibility, my privilege. After all, without one another, we don’t have much at all.

The image above is not my own. It can be found here.

books, change, education, Fast Company, social change, society

Step 22: Seeing Spots

Christa Avampato

“You cannot think your way into a new way of acting, you have to act your way into a new way of thinking.” ~ Jerry Sternin, Founder of The Positive Deviance Initiative

In this month’s issue of Fast Company, there is an excerpt from Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. The book goes on sale February 16th, and this excerpt provides insights into how to find the bright spots, as small and few as they may be, that lead to radical, large-scale, successful change when replicated. The Heaths take a cue from Jerry Sternin, a professor of nutrition at Tufts University, who, along with his wife, Monique (also a professor at Tufts), gave so much to so many around the world. The Professors Sternin founded the movement of positive deviance and advocated for its use around the world.

There is some societal belief that when someone is exceptional, they’re weird. We think that the exceptional do things that no one else can do when really they just do things that no one is doing. William Kamkwamba in Malawi, whom I wrote about earlier this week, illustrates this point perfectly. If we studied them closely, we would find that a couple of key things that they do are different from the majority, and those few differences can be replicated so that the exception becomes the new norm. Jerry and Monique Sternin believed that if we can find the bright spots, we’ll get more understanding of a situation and greater progress than we ever thought possible.

All day today I’ve been looking for bright spots in specific areas of my life. I’m keeping track of them in my little black book. This idea of positive deviance has had me grinning ear to ear all day. Tomorrow, I’ll be back here to talk about some of these recent discoveries. I hope you’ll join me.

The image above is not my own. It can be found here.

art, books, creativity, economy, education, jazz, music, New York City, politics, society

Moving to Higher Ground: How Jazz Can Change Your Life

Christa Avampato

I gave up my horn about 10 years ago because truth be told I wasn’t even mediocre, and even if I practiced for hours a day I’d never be great. I want to be a lot things, but I have no intention of getting in the habit of spending my time being mediocre. I love jazz, but I couldn’t play it. I just don’t have that ability. My creativity is in my writing. 


So for years now I have socked away all of the academic knowledge I built up around the music. (I studied it for a year in college and played in a few different bands.) People ask me if I miss playing, and truth be told I don’t. I never even think about it. Playing music doesn’t hold any kind of magic for me, but I still very much enjoy listening to it, and really what I enjoy is the history, all of the stories that come along with musicians. And there are plenty of stories to go around. 


My brother is a trumpet player and because he is 6 years older than me, I learned about Wynton Marsalis and the Marsalis family at a very young age. When I saw that Wynton would be at my local Barnes and Noble I decided to go hear some of his stories. He was so engaging and charming that I bought his book on sight, which I never do at author readings. And once I started reading Moving to High Ground: How Jazz Can Change Your Life, I couldn’t put it down. (And it helps that his co-author is the brilliant and well-spoken historian, Geoffrey Ward.)


For me the genius of this book is not to tell you about all the drugs that musicians have done, or all the women they’ve had or how down and out and poor they were. It talks about what the music has to teach us about living other aspects of our lives. How we treat each other. It teaches us about acceptance and nurturing and compassion. Wynton lays out the value is studying jazz not to be great, but to realize a certain aspect of humanity that comes through generosity.  Its is a living, breathing thing that connects the generations. It allows us to learn from generations of people who were long gone before we were every a twinkle in our parents’ eyes.  


Wynton goes on to talk about how we all hear something different in the music. He talks about arrogance and greed and the darker sides of our personalities that the music uncovers. But mostly he talks about how musicians with disparate styles can come together, should come together, to create something wholly different than they could ever make on their own. Nobody gets through this world alone in the same way that no jazz musician builds a career alone. Jazz is a way of capturing what it means to be out and about in this world. It’s a way of sharing that experience with others whom we will never meet but for whom our music could be a beacon of freedom if we are strong enough to tell our own stories, look them in the eye, and harvest the very best of what they have to teach us.


Wynton’s thoughts on community come at a particularly poignant time. Throughout the book I thought a lot of about the state of our world. How scary all these moving parts are – the economy, our national security, our political systems, health care, education. There is a lot to be afraid, maybe even more to be afraid of than at any other time in our history. What jazz, and musicians like Wynton teach us, is that the only way we can be safe is to let go of that fear with the confidence that those around us will support us. Their harmonies will carry us through. And if all else fails at least the swingin’ will give us enough encouragement to keep our chins up and the rest of us moving forward with grace.  

books, Mark Penn, society, technology

Social geeks

Christa Avampato

I love ethnographers. I appreciate their fervent desire to bucket people in an attempt to figure out the human race, though I must admit I have never been one to enjoy being in a box. My boss recently passed me the book, Microtrends by Mark Penn, an advisor to Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

When I tell people I work in the field of trend and innovation they assume that I must be checking out the latest “fads” and “fashions”. And I do check those things out, only to the extent that they reveal some underlying and unifying trends that may be emerging. Trends take the long-view, have a psycho-social implication, and signal major shifts in how a large group of people see themselves and their place in the world. This long-view is what holds my interest.

As I read through Microtrends, I discovered a few new interesting groups that I actually belong to, on my own terms. I’m a joiner (there in lying the paradox that while I love groups I hate formal classifications), and so this news of “my people” coming together has got me jazzed. First up, those of us who believe in being DIY doctors. I’ve previously blogged on my neurotic addiction to WebMD, mostly stemming from my preoccupation with health and wellness and the sense of worry etched in my DNA. Turns out that my years-long tracking of WebMD just meant that I was ahead of the trend curve. The tipping point for DIY medicine is approaching, thanks in part to our horrid health insurance system.

Another group I love and seek acceptance to: the Tech Fatales – women and girls who are not only interested in technology but seek to be the people who change and improve the systems and their applications. Finally, those of us who have long been hanging out on the edge contemplating how in the heck all of these technological advancements actually apply to us are not only figuring out that conundrum – we’re also finding new uses for the technologies to make them more applicable to us.

And the last group of note for me – the social geeks. How I love this! Finally a description in two words that does justice to my weirdo nature. I’m so nerdy that at times in my life it has been a source of embarrassment. I was one of those kids who embraced the word “why” with every fiber of my being. My library is my most precious material possession. I have a hard time parting with any of my books, even if I never intend to read them again. And the subject matters are so varied that I have a hard time placing any two books into a single category.

The flipside to my nerd nature is that I have often been correctly accused of being a social butterfly. I love making the rounds, meeting new people, and bringing people together. So imagine my delight when social networking came on the scene in a big way – it would be possible for me to connect with tons of people with all kinds of interests, spread across the globe, all from my cute and comfy apartment. Are you kidding me? Count me in!

Mark Penn points out that Myers-Briggs recently needed to alter their classifications. Previously people interested in technology had been placed in the “introvert” bucket. That’s changed – now people most interested and active in technology are also the most extroverted. Sorry Myers and Briggs: the social geeks will define their own characteristics in their own words.

The above photo can be found at http://www.cnet.co.uk/i/c/blg/websites_feature/1.jpg

business, career, creativity, entertainment, happiness, innovation, money, New York, society, technology, trend, writing

No one needs to pay you

Christa Avampato

From my earliest memories about what profession I’d like to have, I wanted to write. And the troublesome thing to me was always that I may never get anyone to pay me for doing what I love. I’m 31 so when I was growing up, blogs and the like didn’t exist. We were still living in the days of big blue chip companies dominating the globe. “New media” as it’s known today was just a dream inside the imaginations of a handful of people.

Today, I can confidently say that I am a writer. I don’t have a magazine gig. I don’t write for television of film. You can’t see my work in a theatre. I never signed a contract and I don’t have an agent. No one gives me assignments. And it’s no longer just tucked away in some old journal that even I’ll never go back and review, much less have anyone else read. It’s out in the world, in this wonderful thing called the blogosphere and I write whatever I’d like to write about. I do what I want, when I want, which is really the only way I am capable of living my life. I have a disdain for authority or anything that hampers personal freedom and creativity and I am largely a contrarian at the mere mention of phrases like “well, you HAVE to do it this way.” I actually don’t HAVE to do anything, and I won’t.

I used to be weird for feeling this way. Now, it’s become the way of the world. With user-generated content growing by leaps and bounds by the minute, the limits that have been placed on our lives are being ripped down in the blink of an eye. Agents, creative unions, casting directors, TV networks, producers, and film studios used to rule the roost. And while they still wield some power, it is largely dwindling to a modicum of what it used to be. We are very quickly becoming the “take charge of our lives” generation. Contrarians rejoice, we have worked our own way out of the job of being contrarians. (And not a moment too soon. Being a contrarian is exhausting work and I have other things I’d like to be doing!)

Last night I attended the Mustaches for Kids event at the Montauck Club in Park Slope. A hilarious and worthwhile event. The only nosh available was pickles by Bob from McClure’s pickles. (http://www.mcclurespickles.com/) When not in the kitchen whipping up his grandmother’s recipes, he’s acting and writing. He was telling my friend, Monika, and I about a new webtv show he’s on – http://www.theburg.tv/. It’s entirely created by his friends from college who live in Williamsburg. They didn’t create it to make money, they did it for the love of creating. And here’s the good news: they have 4 million people who have watched the show on-line, the audience is global, SAG is contacting, and Michael Eisner’s company is interested in investing in the project. The paradigm of entertainment is being torn down and built up by the talent rather than being dictated to them.

These kinds of success stories by the underdog brighten my day. It is indeed a brand new world. Focus on being great and creating your life, and the money will follow.

business, career, change, creativity, discovery, dreams, experience, Google, innovation, society, technology

Get your head in the clouds

Christa Avampato

I spend about 8 hours on my computer, and roughly 10% of that time belongs to some Google application. I stand in awe of a system that can pull up exactly what I’m looking for, regardless of how obscure the subject, in a fraction of a second. Until today, I had resigned myself to the fact that there was some magic Google elf pulling the info for me. I have confirmed that not only is there an elf, there could actually be a million of them out there in the Googlesphere, known increasingly as a “cloud”.

While it focuses on Google and one engineer’s story, Business Week’s cover story this week talks broadly about how our information world is increasingly being built upon this idea of clouds, a group of hundreds of thousands of computers that are all bolted together to store massive quantities of data. While many companies are struggling this holiday season to stay afloat, Google is contemplating world domination of information. Their mantra can be described as “Whatever you can dream, dream it bigger.” Imagine being at a company that tells you you’re wildest dreams are too small, and that you need to formulate projects that are far more outlandish than even your wildest expectations.

There is a lesson in this wild dream making: every dream can be broken down into very small pieces that can be handled by individual “cloud elves” and then aggregated to get you exactly to where you need to be, all in about half a second. And there is no finite number of tasks. The possibilities are truly endless.

While many companies are in the mode of tempering expectations, pulling in spending, and plummeting morale this holiday season, Google is doing the exact opposite. They are determined to fly high and make sense of the massive amount of knowledge out there. They are so optimistic about what they are capable of accomplishing that they feel these clouds may ultimately push the limits of human imagination. Talk about a tipping point! We have been told for centuries that the human imagination is the most powerful tool on Earth – is it possible that when we pool our imaginations together, we can build something larger than our own sense of creativity?

One last astonishing thing about Google. In all of its success and dreaming, they maintain a public humility that is staggering. They are absolutely fearless when it comes to failure so long as there is learning involved. Their CEO, arguably one of the most powerful and wealthiest men on the planet, sits in a cubicle and moves around from building to building so as to interact with different people at all levels of the organization. And he responds to emails from people at all levels at a unbelievable rate. He is respectful of people’s time, both on and off the job. With someone like this at the helm, it’s no wonder that Google believes in defying limits.

The Business Week article can be found at http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_52/b4064048925836.htm?chan=magazine+channel_top+stories

The picture above can be found at http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/toc/07_52/B4064magazine.htm