A Birthing Centre story

Maternal instincts Gold Coast News | goldcoast.com.au | Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia

She had read that every second baby born to privately insured women in Queensland will be delivered via caesarean section. There was also anecdotal evidence. Friends who had gone private more often than not seemed to end up having c-sections. My wife didn’t want that. What she wanted was another option.

That’s when a friend told her about a relatively new initiative at the Gold Coast Hospital — a midwife-run birthing centre that works on the philosophy of continuity of care.

Expectant mothers are assigned one midwife to guide them through their pregnancies. She is on-call 24 hours a day and visits the mum-to-be’s home for their appointments. The same midwife attends her at birth. There would be no pressure to induce labour or speed it up with drugs. There are no caesareans in the birth centre.

Most expensive

Is Design about designing really expensive things for the super rich? Take a look at these sites and comment if you want.

Born Rich: Cruise to the luxury
lifestyle

In a shipwreck in the Baltic Sea, divers
have found what is being thought to be the world’s oldest and most
expensive drinkable champagne. Believed to be around 230 years old, each
bottle found is expected to go for around $68,000.

Most Expensive Cell Phones in the World -Sony Ericsson Black Diamond $300,000
The World’s Most Expensive Stuff 2010: The Rich Spend Richer – BusinessWeek
The World’s Most Expensive Stuff 2010 – click above to go to slide show

Urwerk UR-202 “White Shark” Highly Limited Watch – Timepieces Luxist

Sonoro Stardust Elements ($2,500) – Gift Guide 2008: 10 tech toys for the filthy rich | DVICE

Short of bedazzling an Aston Martin, the Swarovski crystal-coated clock radio is as showy a gift as you’re going to find. Sure, AM/FM radio and an input for an MP3 player is a staggeringly simple recipe for a single-speaker system, but this does simple in the cutest package since Britney married the first time.

Behind golden Gates

Is it a good this? This Gates Foundation.

via Behind golden Gates.

IN A forthcoming article for The Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, Devi Sridhar, a global health specialist at Oxford University, describes as a ”particularly serious problem” the ”loss of health workers from the public sector to better-funded NGOs offering better remuneration”.

The foundation responds: ”Much of our grant-making goes to large intermediary partners that in turn provide funding and support to those doing the work in the field, often to developing country institutions. We’re not able to provide a simple funding breakdown.”

The rise of the foundation has been part of a larger revival of interest in the West in the problems of poor countries. This phenomenon has encompassed increased government aid budgets, initiatives by the World Health Organisation and World Bank, celebrity-led events and countless private ventures.

What is grassroots Dad?

My daughter had a homework assignment that was a quote from an article by Anita Roddick. The task was to identify which were the ‘persuasive’ words and which were ’emotive’ words. I read the article and got excited by the text – and so got my daughter to see on the internet – RAN, Anita Roddick and then youtube videos of RAN. Along the way we explored the meaning of the word ‘grassroots’. I said to her that I worked at the grassroots level, and that her mother had worked for years as a designer for grassroots organizations. I was impressed that school education – which I dont usually think very much about – was raising consciousness and potentially making kids into activists. This was good.

I then naturally turned my mind to other groups of students – uni students – do they get this sensitization? And we wrong in expecting them to come into uni with a conscience? I am putting the links we looked at today here – and hope its useful.

Video about RAN: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xPkB9gm3Ec&feature=channel

Kids “changing the world”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oROsbaxWH0M&feature=related

Kids and technology: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_A-ZVCjfWf8&feature=related Our

Mission and History | Rainforest Action Network

Rainforest Action Network campaigns for the forests, their inhabitants and the natural systems that sustain life by transforming the global marketplace through education, grassroots organizing, and non-violent direct action.

Welcome to AnitaRoddick.com by Anita Roddick, founder of The Body Shop.

I have spent a great deal of time in Brazil, often dealing directly with the struggles of Amazonian Indians struggling to protect their rainforest from poachers and their way of life from disease and discrimination. But for such a beautiful nation, Brazil’s ills aren’t isolated in the trees. On the streets of Brazil’s cities, dozens of children die violently every week, hundreds more are savagely beaten, and thousands live in squalor, neglect, and persecution on the streets.

Co-Editor – Encyclopedia of Asian Design

I am writing the section on South Asia and South East Asian Design – for the Encyclopedia of Asian Design.

Southeast Asian Design Reflects Diversity — AIGA | the professional association for design

Vietnam Vietnam underwent a dramatic transformation in the mid 1990’s. The dour, Soviet-style police state is changing into a vibrant, dynamic and increasingly open society. However, the old mindset and the new open-mindedness co-exist rather comfortably. It is not uncommon to find the streets plastered with emblems of the Party next to the Swoosh and Party officials spewing Marxism-Leninism wisdom as they embrace consumerism.

 

Fifth Goal

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A project to look at Design Solutions for the Millennium Goal #5.

World Changing

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Designers are talking about changing the world. Some call is social design, some call it service design, many call it design thinking. What is this? These are new ways of thinking, new wasy of solving probelms and new problems. Its sayonara to object design!