1984 Calendar. Photo Credit: Steve Mays

Ready to throw out your wall calendar from 2011 and buy a new one for 2012? Here’s another option if you’re resourceful and eccentric enough to try it: get an old calendar from 1984 to use for this year and save the 2011 calendar for 2022. In both cases, the dates will line up appropriately. You can consult timeanddate.com to find old calendars that will match up with a given year.

It’s a trick I learned from my grandfather who passed away last year. For those of us who don’t have a multi-decade stockpile of old calendars lying around, Wisebread.com suggests shopping for old calendars on eBay or Craigslist. My grandfather did it the old-fashioned way. He was a radiologist by trade who worked his way through school by working on farms. Farming had been a part of his life ever since, and he kept a gentleman’s farm in Ripley, NY. When he moved to an assisted living facility, my uncle took over much of the farm maintenance, but my grandfather would still go on excursions to do work on the farm until his last days. The calendar trick was a good example of his understanding that in a system like a farm, there is no waste – only resources. Also, it shows a kind of poetry that everything happens in cycles. In our day-to-day, most of us only conceptualize cycles of a week or a month or a year. But sometimes we recognize an underlying rhythm of a larger scale. ]]> http://mike-eng.com/re-using-old-calendars/feed/ 0 http://mike-eng.com/new-work-developing-a-dynamic-schedule-in-wordpress/ http://mike-eng.com/new-work-developing-a-dynamic-schedule-in-wordpress/#comments Wed, 21 Dec 2011 18:32:17 +0000 mrengy http://mike-eng.com/?p=2289

Dynamic Schedule page

Here’s an example of how we pushed WordPress to the limit – achieving some of the power of Drupal while maintaining the top-notch usability of WordPress. One of the more involved pieces of the theme was a dynamic schedule of conference activities.

View the full project description to see how we did it: Developing a Dynamic Schedule in WordPress. ]]> http://mike-eng.com/new-work-developing-a-dynamic-schedule-in-wordpress/feed/ 0 http://mike-eng.com/using-open-source-software-for-the-better-world-by-design-website/ http://mike-eng.com/using-open-source-software-for-the-better-world-by-design-website/#comments Sat, 27 Aug 2011 13:46:36 +0000 mrengy http://mike-eng.com/?p=2172

MOVE from Rick Mereki on Vimeo.

The Modern Diner in all its Glory. Photo credit: Elizabeth Thomsen

There’s an ongoing debate about whether design should be upheld as a specialized profession requiring serious training or whether the basics, at least, can be taught to anyone easily (without $140,000 and 4 years in design school). Some maintain that everyone is a designer to some extent whether or not he/she realizes it. In 2006, students and faculty from Maryland Institute College of Art created a book called D.I.Y: Design It Yourself that sparked quite a controversy on the subject.

Here is an example of the “everyone is a designer” side of the argument.

A menu can be thought of as a down-to-earth example of information architecture. Just about every menu does it – breaking up dishes into categories (appetizers, entrees, sides, drinks, desserts) and sometimes sub-categories (beef, poultry, seafood, vegetarian) and then individual dishes.

Menu Side 1: Sweet

Menu Side 2: Savory

Illustration Credit: Rakka

I recently became aware of how taste feedback can be important in accomplishing an everyday task.

I bought dental floss not long ago without paying much attention to what I was buying. Turns out, it was mint-flavored dental floss. While flossing with it for the first time, I became oddly disoriented by the fresh minty taste. It wasn’t a positive or negative reaction to the taste itself. It was disorientation with the task at hand.

We’re all familiar with feedback – mostly in the visual or auditory sense. Press a button to call an elevator, and it lights up to tell you that you’ve pressed it. Press a newfangled crosswalk button, and it beeps. Without feedback, there is no confirmation that our intended input was successful. People press the old style crosswalk buttons repeatedly hoping that out of the six or seven attempts they make to trigger the button, one will be successful. Side note: many old corsswalk buttons are leftover “placebo buttons” that have been made obsolete by computer-controlled systems. In some cases, they actually trigger the traffic lights, but only at certain times.

What I realized in this case was that while flossing, I use the sense of taste for feedback. Taste tells me whether I have dislodged a piece of food. It’s my light on the elevator call button. With mint floss, the light was on all the time. It’s like trying to read text that is all bold or navigate an intersection littered with too many signs.

Next time, it’s back to unflavored floss.

Improvised Cutting Board Rack

My friends Adam and Alyssa came up with this bit of ingenuity. The problem: lack of shelf space in their kitchen.

The solution seemed almost too intentional to be improvised. They mounted a garden hose rack on the side of the counter and turned it into a cutting board rack.

Your garden-variety garden hose rack. Photo by Jeff / Godfrey.

Ah, moving. I associate it with purging old junk on eBay, asking friends for large favors, and shopping at Ikea.

I always appreciate their furniture / product design and usually appreciate their instruction manuals too. This manual for a step stool though was a bit quirky. Let’s try to make sense of some of these universal messages one-by-one.

This step stool has the power to levitate a 100kg weight.

This step stool is not a set of stilts with training legs.

This step stool will disappear behind a magic detective lens in the enclosed spy kit.

This step stool is not a defenestration accessory.

Do not use a paintbrush that is larger than this step stool without assistance.

This step stool is not intended to be used as a weather balloon.

Good laughs. In all seriousness though, it makes me wonder about the possibilities of creating an interactive project with no words. It would be an interesting exercise, at least.

We started the project with interviews, then created personas, and began exploring some options for the visual design. See the project workspaces to view the outcomes of these initial steps.

The team generated a first round sketches for the UI, some of which involved a smooth but long selection process before any information graphics were shown. Some other versions presented suggested visualizations based on items in the news or popular visualizations.

Also, some versions had a clear split between making the selection for which data to view and the presentation of the data itself, while others had a more hybrid approach.

In reviewing the first round of sketches and our interview results, it became clear that our users will not want to deal with an involved multi-step UI before any data is presented. Also, some users will tend to search for something specific, while some will want to be able to discover interesting patterns based on a candidate or a contributor.

Some sketches in the context of the user flow. View PDF in new window.

Detail of UI version 2. View full image.