I was reading in the New York Times about a new technology, Slydial, that lets callers dial a mobile phone but avoid an actual conversation, by sending the call directly to the recipient's voice mail. The call goes undetected by the recipient, who just receives their phone's standard alert that a voice mail has been received.

In the article, Slydial was used by one person to break-up with a suitor, by another to call in sick to work, and by another to avoid talkative family members. People are structuring communication to constantly just miss one another—on purpose.

I thought today's technologies were creating an era of ubiquitous communication. Turns out, we're becoming a nation of non-communicators. Technologies like Slydial, e-mail and blogging give the writer the power to control when and how communication is structured, and academics are noting a trend. Facebook, radar.net and twitter let us blast information out to friends, but don't really require us to listen to the response. Folks are more interested in broadcasting data than engaging in some good old give and take.

I know I make my living using technology to increase efficiency. Still, that efficiency shouldn't always come at the cost of a personal connection. This Labor Day, take a break from email and blogging and pick up the phone.

Connecting to Care is an initiative founded by the AIDS Action Foundation to foster a new way of thinking about and addressing the United States' HIV epidemic and health care crisis. The initiative is a framework for education about and implementation of methodologies that help connect people living with HIV to appropriate and continuous medical care.

Specifically, the objectives of the Connecting to Care initiative are:

• To identify and document medical support service methodologies that have evidence of success in connecting HIV+ people to care.
• To disseminate the Connecting to Care workbooks to be used as tools for program enhancement within a wide scope of health service settings.
• To educate about the history of social and governmental developments in HIV as they relate to the epidemic in the United States and the needs of the populations living within its borders.
• To bridge an understanding between the federal strategy to address HIV and the practical operations of health service settings.
• To facilitate the successful connection to care of HIV+ people aware of their status who are not in regular medical care.

Connecting to Care includes workbooks, conference workshops, training seminars, consultations and the publication of "field notes" which provide updates and current thinking from the field. Hodgson was engaged by the AIDS Action Foundation to redesign the Connecting to Care site into one that that easily navigable, allowed for easy adding and editing of site information, and that reflected the overall branding objectives of their international initiative.

Hodgson worked with an existing design scheme to create a new look and feel for the site, develop an information architecture that makes accessing information intuitive for end users, and configured AIDS Action's Joomla Content Management System to incorporate the new design templates. Hodgson also built out the structure for the site's pages, including its document listing and content pages.

The result is a site that offers a concise method for organizing current information and thinking, while offering scalability as the site's resources and knowledge bank grow.