“whimsicist”

What was meant to happen, happened. I ended up participating in my own infodesign calendar challenge (where, of course, I’m one of the judges—my mom and a friend being the other two). Rather, I was one of the judges. The challenge’s doing a lot of soul-searching right now, looking for new judges, and even wondering whether it would be better to call itself a cooperation instead of a competition. (Thoughts?)

I started the challenge because while I thought designing a better calendar was a fascinating problem, I had no idea whatsoever of how to attack it. Then a magical thing happened with other people’s submissions: no big idea came, but a myriad minor improvements suggested themselves. So I started building mockups and tweaking them a little here, a little there, to prove minor points to myself. The tweaking got out of control, ate more and more of my time, and suddenly biggish, elegant ideas started coming up.

So I spent the past 5, 6 days drawing calendars over and over (and over). It was part escapism from my grandfather dying in the room below mine, but it was also unbelievable fun designing something and then have it be extruded into atoms by my clunky but trusty HP—how concrete and intricate, how physical!^EEM I felt like a miniature artisan or a clockworker. And it really is wonderful to work in a simple problem you can easily explain to people.

This down here is the current outcome (there’s a Spanish version here). Click on it for detailed instructions (if you need’em), descriptions and critique. It’s the end result of a lot of incremental improvements I’ve painstakingly tried to document in this Flickr set—funny it now looks so glaringly obvious.

What do you think? I’ve fiddled with it for several days now and have returned to it again and again. My tired eyes see no clear way of improving it—how about yours? (Here, btw, is the (Excel 2007) source file—yours to fiddle with and build upon.)

(btw2: I did all my prototypes in my beta-testing version of Excel 2007^ELZR. Thought it would be a good chance to take it for a spin and see what the much-vaunted interface improvements amounted too. Turns out they’re rightly vaunted. It’s as good as they told you and then a little better. It’s just so much easier, so much more pleasurable to use the program when so many options are so neatly displayed. The live previews I thought so little of in the videos turn out to be surprisingly helpful. Goodbye toolbar clutter, welcome ribbon. It’s a revolution worth Vista’s failed one.)

Here I go trying to coin yet another neologism ^ELZR in yet another abuse of the universal soapbox that is the blog. This time, why not be grand?, I’m going to tackle the most famous neologism lack of all: a name for the decade that yawns between 2000 and 2009. In written form, one usually calls it the 2000s but the “two thousands” is just plain silly. Other proposed names, taken from the 2000s pedia, are the “noughties” (the least narrowspread of the proposals), “the zeroes”, “double zeroes”, the “aughts”, “double-aughts”, “oh’s”, “double oh’s”, “oh-oh’s” “aughties”, “oughties”, “2K’s”, “uh-ohs”, “zoogs”, and “ozies”. Obviously, the search still continues.

So here’s my stab at it: let’s call it, elliptically, “the first decade”. It’s a tad millenialist but also fittingly portentous. It is also universal (“la primera decada”, “la première décennie”, “die erste Dekade”, “最初の十年”, “a primeira década”, “Первое десятилетие”, “la prima decade”), easily extendable (2010-2019 is “the second decade”, 2020-2029 “the third decade”, and so on), perfectly memorable, immediately understandable, and, let’s face it, just plain cool. It’s a whole new language for talking and thinking about our century.

Here some usage examples:

• Wikipedia is a multilingual, Web-based, free-content encyclopedia project, born with the first decade.^WP
• By the second decade, we’ll be adding more than a year, every year, to human life expectancy.^ELZR
• Third-decade ipods will be able to carry every piece of content ever created.^ELZR
• At the beginning of the fifth decade, there will be 9 billion people on the planet.^ELZR

A better design to fit a year calendar comfortably within a business card.

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.

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 card^WP) 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.

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.

I think the best existing metaphor for what we would like to accomplish here are modern statistical innovations like the boxplot^WP or the stem-and-leaf plot^WP—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, Number^AM)

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.

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!

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?)

Making posters has been a hobby of mine since I can remember. At high school I tried to start a series of posters on moral values but only finished one on gayness and another on licentiousness. At college, I made one on Esperanto and several for the cinema club I ran with some friends.

This one, my latest, is about the Jicama fruit^WP and it plays on a joke by Friends’s Chandler: “Cheese. It’s milk that you chew.” The funny thing is that for Jicamas it’s almost true, from the fruit’s pedia:

Scott McCloud begins Understanding Comics^AM wrangling to create a definition of comics, contrasting it with pictures and movies. Taken individually, a picture is merely that, a picture. Arranged sequentially however, pictures are transformed into something else. If the sequence is temporal—pictures alternating in time, fixed in space—we call that art movies. If the sequence is spatial—pictures adjacent in space, “juxtaposed”—we call it comics.

So that’s that. His is a great book and you won’t regret reading it, but for now hearken back with me to the web before blogs. There was, in such olden times, something called the «personal homepage»: primeval websites where people put their disjointed personal trivia for the world to admire. (See An Exploratory Profile of Personal Home Pages: Content, Design, Metaphors.) They were usually boring, disorienting, and self-flattering (think photo albums) but there had been nothing like that before, not on this scale—you could learn about fascinating people you’d otherwise never meet and there were some unbelievable things out there. But back to the photo album metaphor. Personal homepages were piles of scattered, assorted personal paraphernalia—they were, in a way, photo albums.

Then the blogs started to appear. It took a while to notice anything had changed. The diary metaphor obscured as much as it enlightened. With some hindsight it’s easy to pinpoint what happened—and to marvel at how simple yet radical a change it was. The blog era is when websites learned about sequence, spatial sequence. They stopped being fractal trees of buried content and became, yes, comics—post became the new panel.

By spatial, we mean that blogs, just as comics, unfold in space. There’s a post and right below it there’s another, further below, another, and so on. It makes as much sense to talk of a “blog strip” as of a “comic strip”—about the only difference is that the former goes from top-to-bottom while the latter from left-to-right (or right-to-left).

And then there’s sequence. Sequence brought context, interface and development to websites, it gave them personality, motion, and tension, made them subject to change and thus to evolution. Sequence brought time.

Every page in a blog has a natural context: it comes after the previous post and before the next. A blog’s homepage is simply a broad sweep of the most recent panels posts in the strip—an easy way to glimpse the website’s personality and recent happenings. If you’re faithful (or diligent), you can see the writing and the themes evolve through time. The mind fills in the gaps, the bleeds, and the continuity that emerges can feel as real and intense as reality itself. Spatial interface is a brilliant interface in its almost ridiculous simplicity.

(Blogs are the web’s poster boy for spatial sequence but they’re by no means the only (or the first) web form to avail itself of it. Comments, within blogs and beyond, are also spatially sequenced, are also comics. So are forum threads.)

What, then, is the equivalent of movies in the web? What web form is temporally sequenced—”pictures” alternating in time, fixed in space? The hard part, really, was coming up with the question. The answer is obvious: wikis.

Consider a popular pedia^ELZR (Wikipedia article). It’s the product of a myriad interventions (most of them rather trivial) from several Wikipedists, but you are only seeing the most recent frame when visiting the pedia’s URL. If you visit in a couple of hours, chances are someone corrected a typo, reverted vandalism, or added a sentence, and you will thus see a slightly different frame—the pedia has “moved”! Unknown to a surprising amount of users, every pedia has a history where a log is kept of even the most minute change—the movie’s celluloid film. Wikis are movies.

This is, I think, a pretty good glimpse of one of the roles I want to play the next decade—don’t give up on me! :)

Have you thought just how much you can say, in this tongue we speak in right now, just with words made of just one piece of sound? How short, how sweet, how wow! No? You think it’s no big deal? Well, my hard to please friend, I ask you then to put all that I’ve just said (and a wee bit more that I still have to pour), in words as short as mine, in a tongue that is not the tongue we speak in right now.

We’ll talk then.

(And if you got a thing or two, nice or bad, to say back to this post, please please a form fool and keep your words short. Thanks!)

I guess it’s such an obvious rebus^WP scores of people must have had it already, but I’d never seen it before, it just occurred to me this morning, and am quite fancying it right now. (Pretty cherry from Kainoatec)