“spacetime”
4 posts under this tag.
Sunny Bains’s Mixed Feelings is a cool article in last month’s Wired about synthetic synesthesias: using technology to give us new senses by using old ones’ bandwidth. Stuff like using the tongue to see, or, below, using touch to locate.
For six weird weeks in the fall of 2004, Udo Wächter had an unerring sense of direction. Every morning after he got out of the shower, Wächter, a sysadmin at the University of Osnabrück in Germany, put on a wide beige belt lined with 13 vibrating pads — the same weight-and-gear modules that make a cell phone judder. On the outside of the belt were a power supply and a sensor that detected Earth’s magnetic field. Whichever buzzer was pointing north would go off. Constantly.
The brain, it turns out, is dramatically more flexible than anyone previously thought, as if we had unused sensory ports just waiting for the right plug-ins. Now it’s time to build them.
“It was slightly strange at first,” Wächter says, “though on the bike, it was great.” He started to become more aware of the peregrinations he had to make while trying to reach a destination. “I finally understood just how much roads actually wind,” he says. He learned to deal with the stares he got in the library, his belt humming like a distant chain saw. Deep into the experiment, Wächter says, ”I suddenly realized that my perception had shifted. I had some kind of internal map of the city in my head. I could always find my way home. Eventually, I felt I couldn’t get lost, even in a completely new place1.”
Some intriguing stories here about the brain that will delight anyone who has read Jeff Hawkin’s mind-bendingly good On IntelligenceAM. Another example:
 More than 50 years ago, Austrian researcher Ivo Kohler gave people goggles that severely distorted their vision: The lenses turned the world upside down. After several weeks, subjects adjusted — their vision was still tweaked, but their brains were processing the images so they’d appear normal. In fact, when people took the glasses off at the end of the trial, everything seemed to move and distort in the opposite way.
Of course any true Jeff fan would nod knowingly and immediately quote back with:
Patterns are all the brain knows about. Brains are pattern machines. It’s not incorrect to express the brain’s functions in terms of hearing or vision, but at the most fundamental level, patterns are the name of the game. No matter how different the activities of various cortical areas may seem from each other, the same basic cortical algorithm is at work. The cortex doesn’t care if the patterns originated in vision, hearing, or another sense. It doesn’t care if its inputs are from a single sensory organ or from four. Nor would it care if you happened to perceive the world with sonar, radar, or magnetic fields, or if you had tentacles rather than hands, or even if you lived in a world of four dimensions rather than three.
Jeff Hawkins, On IntelligenceAM, p2
Being a fan of the concept since my soundscape post, however, I was surprised the article doesn’t mention the inspiration for my post and the most widespread example yet of a synthetic synesthesia: the beeping proximity sensor in many vehicles—space as sound. My brain has become so used to it that at times glancing back seems like a distraction.
The (Date-Ink Maximizing) Dream
A better design to fit a year calendar comfortably within a business card.
Thumbnail Gallery of Submissions
Introduction
It all started because my 48-year-old mom, blessed her, can’t read small type very well. She has trouble using little calendar cards because the day numerals are so small and last time she complained I paused and empathized with her travail. The problem, it was suddenly obvious, was not only the marketing debris that encroaches upon every poor card but rather the quite wasteful scheme we use for representing a year—the same table with the same thirty-something numbers over and over.
Dream Constraints
Take a fancy flight, don’t assume anything, not even numbers, as long as you keep these things in mind:
- The bigger the type size (or meaningful features) the better.
- The smaller the design the better. The original goal was for it to fit comfortably (you can use both sides of the paper) within 86 by 54 millimeters (3.370 by 2.125 in) of paper (your standard business cardWP) but something slightly bigger could be just as useful. We are going for useful. (Thanks Dave Pawson!)
- Immediately understandable (or pretty darn close).
- Should span an entire year.
- On any given “date” of the year, be able to easily tell what its name, its month, and its month number is.
- Instant: The less steps you need to know before knowing a date’s data the better.
- Contextual: You should be able to easily “walk” from a date to another one close by, thereby counting the days between them. People do this all the time.
- Markable: You should be able to easily mark (circle, cross, check) holidays and special dates.
A Note
Yes, I know mom could carry some sort of foldable large-type calendar, 12 calendar cards with a month each, or simply start wearing her prescribed glasses (nigh impossible), but that’s off the point right now. Let that true story be our convenient pretext for innovation.
Also note that though the idea arose out of accessibility concerns, everyone would benefit with it, just as we all grip the helping handles in hotel bathtubs.
Getting The Inspiration Thing Going
I think the best existing metaphor for what we would like to accomplish here are modern statistical innovations like the boxplotWP or the stem-and-leaf plotWP—proof that novel, almost magical displays of breathtaking elegance are just around the corner. IBM’s thread arcs is a recent example.
Another good metaphor might be the Roman number system WP vs. the Hindu-Arabic one WP. For some five thousand millennia the best humanity could produce in its oldest art, reckoning, was the crude, procrustean Roman system—so primitive that it made even multiplication specialists’ labor. Then in a flight of fancy some unknown Hindu stumbled upon the (graphical!) principle of position—it was as far-reaching a discovery as can be imagined, allowing for the development of simple, clear-cut arithmetical rules that became the cornerstone for algebra, itself the cornerstone of modern mathematics. (If the topic interests you, do read Tobias Dantzig’s classic account, NumberAM)
More down-to-earth, the calendar and clock pedias are obvious and essential starting points—history is as good a source of what could be as it is of what has been. Information Aesthetics’ Creative Calendar Design showcase should get your creative designs flowing, and so should a quick search through the site for clocks. Tokyoflash has some interesting interfaces for telling time.
Also, dad showed me an old planner of his that had something called a perpetual calendar WP: a 5-page calendar that tells you what day it was between 1821 to 2080. Here’s a scanning of it. Perhaps it could help to find useful patterns in the Gregorian calendar WP.
Finally, don’t let constraints paralyze you. Don’t think a proposal has to be “perfect” or “right” to submit it, the tiniest improvement could turn out to be crucial.
The reason we have more efficient technologies is that we learned from doing it wrong the first time. Progress is continual refinement. It’s not about the goal, it’s about the process. The point is not to do it “the right way”. The point is to do it.
Technicalities
Anyone can submit a proposal. A proposal consists of a picture mock up. To submit a proposal comment this post with your name and a link to your mockup (we’ll put the picture up here in the post in the Submissions section). Submit as many proposals as you wish. Submit in parallel to the Information Aesthetics post on the challenge for extra promotion to your work.
Though you submit proposals through the comments that doesn’t mean your comments need limit to proposals. Not at all. Please share ideas, point to inspirational sources, suggest evaluation criteria, ask, answer, pick your favorites, praise, mock, and critique proposals. Warning, mini calendar making is highly addictive!
I’ll consider today, Monday January 22, 2007, the challenge’s start date. It will be open for a month (we have to give the unconscious time to do its magic), closing Tuesday February 22, 2007. My biotech friend Zamantha, my mom, and me will be the judges. I’ll announce the winner Monday February 26, 2007—my birthday—here in this post.
The challenge will still end by Feb. 22, 2007, but since I’m participating I don’t know who should be the judge or whether there’ll be a judge at all—or even a “winner”. Perhaps we should call this a cooperation instead of a competition?
The judge has spoken (congrats to Adam Sporka!) but the challenge ain’t over friends. Please keep the submissions flowing! Take our breath away with an evolutionary/revolutionary design!
Reward
The journey. Of course. ;)
Just imagine if your design works. It would make for an unbeatable showcase to scream your mindboggling information design talent to the world everywhere you go: by definition, it’d be universally useful, universally impressive, portable, and easy to explain (even to your mother!). It would be (literally) the perfect presentation card. People would use your creation many times every year and mutter praise to your name every single time. The eternal gratitude of the presbyope WP kind would be yours (and with most people over 40 afflicted to some degree, that’s a substantial percent of the global population). Even more far-reachingly, people who use your calendar would mentally represent and understand the year through your design—you would have created a new metaphor for time. Just think about that.
(Plus! It’s still early in the year, The year’s almost over, what better gift for friends and family than a 2007 2008 pocket calendar of your own making?)
I loved the above composition. Perhaps it’s just that I took Scott McCloud’s Understanding ComicsWP epiphany too seriously, but I feel there’s something deep about it. Space and time are one, do you see? The three small panels on top convey a quick sequence (and I can’t help but hear a zippo clicking open and the smallest of sighs), while the long panel invites us to rest on her at leisure. And we can go back, turn back time and see it all over again. Or stop it altogether and focus on the third panel with its bright flame. Or we can go backwards, make it into an infinitely regressive spiral. Or we can try and take it all in one visual gulp. Present is where you are. And all it takes is looking.
Space is time’s ultimate interface.
There’s also another superb quick-closeup, similar in structure, in AnimatrixWP ’s Final Flight of the OsirisWP. It’s more joltingly impactful, to be sure, but that’s also its greatest shortcoming: it’s gone before you notice it. Our interfaces have evolved and our media player can let us see it slowly, frame by frame, but we can’t readily choose our frame. We can’t try and take it all and dream of synchronicity. That is, we can’t unless we space the frames.
I just finished re-installing Google Desktop for the fifth time (I always find it annoying after a while) and was surprised with this new gadgets thing. It may not be terribly useful, granted, but cool it is (specially with the Shift hotkey). Right now I have a virtual flower, a calculator, and a clock, 12/60, that just might be the coolest time interface ever. It needs no explanation, just install it and stare at it—the epiphany will hit you in bare seconds.
Oh, this is in fact so pretty that it has got me excited once more with my color clock of yore. Maybe I’ll port it to Javascript this week, you know, just as some Javascript back-to-shape calisthenics.
|
RSS
email
