In this episode of The Digital Life, we discuss the recent BIF10 innovation conference, and some of the notable presentations including: Dan Pink’s new TV show Crowd Source, where social science and design for behavior change meet reality TV, and Rupal Patel’s project at Northeastern University to bring customized speech to the vocally impaired, The Human Voicebank.

Today’s democratic system in the United States is largely the same as that instituted in 1789 under our first president, George Washington. This much-celebrated system is based on the original democracy from ancient Athens, established almost 2,000 years earlier. Fast forward to 2014. Congressional approval is at a record low, hovering around 10%. Partisanship seems to permeate every crevice of our government. Examples of government waste and questionable policies far outnumber examples of government being good and effective. OK, so that perception might have something to do with the media, but the bottom line is our federal government is operating in a way that very few of us are satisfied with.

In this episode of The Digital Life, we discuss how we might find a better way. Combining common, everyday technologies with a new concept of who should represent us, Dirk Knemeyer provides a vision to redesign democracy into a system more appropriate for the realities of 2014 while moving closer to its philosophical origins.

In this episode of The Digital Life, we discuss the right way to hire a digital studio — from skipping the RFP to starting with a test project to making sure company culture matches up between designer and client — based on a series of blog posts by Dirk Knemeyer. We’re more than three decades into the digital age, and yet companies still have difficulty finding the right fit when it comes to design providers. Why should that be the case? Join us as we share our experience in the trenches of software design, and reflect on the right way to establish the best client / consultant relationship possible.

In this episode of The Digital Life, we delve into the reasons that user experience has become the “it” field of the moment. Is it the desire for great design, created by companies like Apple? Is it pressure to create universal software experiences that honor and support the BYOD movement in the enterprise? Is it the app-ification of software? Or is it something else entirely?

And, for the creative class who thought their jobs were safe, we explore the (possibly) frightening topic of the automation of knowledge work. Are no industries safe from the eventual reach of the machine? And, does it matter for humans in the long term, or will the outcome be a positive one, with free time and leisure dominating our existence?