Mayo Clinic Meditation is a clinically validated method of meditation you can easily practice using your iPhone or iPod Touch. Developed by Mayo Clinic, this meditation program will help you feel more focused and relaxed throughout your day. Mayo Clinic Meditation uses musical chords and circles to teach you slow, paced breathing which can help clear your mind of daily distractions, leaving you feeling calm, refreshed and at peace. You can choose either the 5 or 15 minute meditation program for your relaxation and enjoyment. The 5 minute program is perfect when you have just a few minutes to unwind. For maximum benefit, make time for the 15 minute program, which guides you through three cycles of paced breathing and silent meditation.
Mayo Clinic Meditation is based upon the research of Amit Sood, M.D., a consultant in the Complementary and Integrative Medicine program at Mayo Clinic. Complimentary and integrative medicine aims to promote wellness by strengthening the communication between your mind and your body. Dr. Sood has published an initial clinical study showing the benefits of Mayo Clinic Meditation. The pilot study indicates that this simple paced-breathing meditation program can reduce stress and improve overall quality of life.
Go to Mayo Clinic Meditation link.
iPhone application link.
Graduates are emerging from interdisciplinary master’s programs that integrate design, technology, and business. These professionals are trained in “design thinking.” Sure, it’s the latest trendy term to sweep the business world, but it’s a technique that designers and executives alike hope may help to provide a solution to some of the world’s serious challenges. Business Week recently focused on twenty-one recent graduates.
Featured above is Caroline Lu, 32, a 2008 graduate of California College of the Arts, San Francisco. She currently is a designer/researcher at SPARC Design Studio, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minn. Lu works at the Center for Innovation, a department within the Mayo Clinic that looks to improve the patient experience by developing better services for health-care delivery. Using her background as a graphic designer and design thinker—along with her own experience surviving cancer—she applies personal insight and design-driven techniques to come up with new ideas.
See her college work.
The work of James Cutler, FAIA, and Bruce Anderson, AIA, of Cutler Anderson Architects is internationally renowned for its environmental awareness and meticulous attention to detail. Each project begins with an investigation of place and materials and culminates in a finely crafted building that fits seamlessly into the landscape.
Rockport publishing offers The Best of Cutler Anderson Architects, the firm’s outstanding designs from two previous Rockport volumes, James Cutler and Cutler Anderson Architects, as well as new and equally compelling projects from around the world that expand the firm’s vocabulary
Go to Cutler Anderson Architects site.
For more than 30 years Prairie Avenue Bookshop had been a staple of the architectural and design community. It also had a global outreach with its vast online catalog of books on architecture and design. As of September the largest architectural bookstore in the world closed its doors due to the high cost of doing business in Downtown Chicago and poor sales. The story of the beloved bookstore began when the owners Marylin and Wilbert Hasbrouck founded the Prairie Avenue School Press in 1961 to reprint Louis Sullivan’s “A System of Architectural Ornament.”
In the early 1980s, Prairie Avenue Bookshop was one of the first independent bookstores to adopt computers, shipping books around the globe, thus establishing itself as the premier architectural bookstore in the world. By the late 1980s, Prairie Avenue became a meeting place for avante garde and mainstream architects as well as architectural historians. The bookshop includes furniture designed by Frank Loyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, and Joseph Hoffman. The closing of this venerable bookshop is symptomatic of the way this digital age has affected and transformed the publishing business. Prairie Avenue Bookshop shall be sadly missed.
Luke Jerram creates sculptures, installations, soundscapes, and live arts projects that investigate the mysterious process of how we construct inner worlds from objective reality. His work is inspired by such disparate areas of research as biology, acoustic science, sleep research, ecology, and neural pathways. Recently Jerram’s H1N1 sculpture was accepted permanently into the Wellcome Collection in London.
Visit the artist’s website.
Take a walk outside and look around. You’ll begin building a deeper understanding and appreciation for subtlety. Nature can be loud, but it usually whispers. You’ll also sharpen your observational skills. Great designers are great observers. You’ll learn more about color than any color wheel or book can teach you. Lastly, you’ll clear your mind and fill it back up at the same time. Very few things can achieve a simultaneous refresh and refill.
Read more.
A very unique part of the Portland skyline. The lights were shut down last Thursday evening on the sign, and the future is unknown. The University of Oregon is at the center of this political mess.
Read more at Williamette week.
High IQ Doesn’t Equal Success, Focus on Your EQ. Researchers have studied this paradox and in the past decade have begun to question the correlation between IQ, success, and happiness. They’ve found another type of intelligence, one that has to do with emotions, may be a more important determiner of overall success in life.
Read more.
Test Yourself.
Though they’ve mined many genres throughout their careers, noir seems to be the Coens’ touchstone. From the gritty thriller Blood Simple to the luminous, moody Man Who Wasn’t There to The Big Lebowski with its Philip Marlow-esque “Dude,” they have done noir every which way, filtering its absurdity, sense of disorientation, alienation, and cynicism through their uniquely skewed sensibility. Yet the Coens also toss a funny bone into their movies, employing brazen slapstick, deliciously clever banter, gallows humor, and even sight gags with relish. Their films seem to embody the pure joy they take in their work.
For more info.
