The UNU Media Studio team (Luis, David and Andreina) traveled to Kobe recently to scout for characters and attend the HAT (Happy Active Town) Kobe Community Festival. While there, the team interviewed Mr. Kazuo Sakamoto (82), a community leader who has lived in the HAT for the past 10 years.

Sakamoto-san shared his views on community and personal health, reminding us that the secret to remaining active and healthy is very simple: eat well, sleep well and don’t worry about negative things.

This research interview is the start of a long term documentary project that will focus on aging looking at its links to technology and social ties.

Related links:
WHO, social determinants of health
English Longitudinal Study of Aging

As the world becomes more and more urbanized, the Media Studio turns its gaze towards a new theme: healthy urbanization in low resource settings. For this project, Bangalore (also known as the Silicon Valley of India due to the large number of IT companies thriving there) will be our new location.
Bangalore’s wide, tree-lined avenues filled with loud, yellow auto rickshaws welcomed us. But digging deeper, we found a city struggling with rapid urbanization and massive population growth.
To get a clearer picture of the situation, we visited some of the poorest areas of Bangalore and spoke to the people living there. We also attended a seminar on healthy urbanization, organized by WHO – Kobe Center (our partner in this project), which helped understand the challenges of building healthier communities in urban areas.
We thank WKC, WHO – India, HUP, SHINE and Mad Monitor Productions for their guidance during this mission and we look forward to their inputs in the next phase of this project.

It is three years since our last major update of our website and we felt that it was time for a change in direction. In two installments, I would like to explain some of the thinking that went into redesign our web presence. Let me start by talking about the “why” and the “how” in this post.
Why?
The content on our old site did not accurately represent the name of the site – “Online Learning.” This meant that many visitors were dissatisfied and did not stay around long to explore. In addition, our content had grown stale. So one challenge was to redesign the site so as to make the content more relevant, targeted and easy to understand and as a result to increase our site traffic and exposure on the web.
How?
Our new site development coincided with an internal evaluation of our approach to work. Before we could design the new site we spent considerable time on the philosophy underpinning our work. We recognized that three components – “Build, Share, Collaborate”- represent the core of what we do here in the UNU Media Studio. Using this philosophy as a guide we were able to define our web site goals. Of course, there was debate as to what we should include in the site, how it should work but we all decided that if it didn’t fit with our new philosophy then it would not be included.
In the next post, I will talk about the technologies we used to build the site.