Don Havey

http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/12/2000-year-old-a.html

In environmental planning, there’s something called a windrose which displays the intensity and frequency of the wind at a particular location, in relation to the cardinal points.

I decided the other day (after once again finding myself explaining what my workload this year has been like) to create a “workrose” that displayed my workload over a specified time period.

I built this thing pretty quickly in Processing. It loads an XML file that contains all of the projects that I’ve worked on this year and dates/events/milestones for each. The data is arranged in radial fashion, beginning with 365 days ago (located at 12:01 on the clock), and progressing clockwise to the current date (at 12:00).

I think it gives a nice overview of how projects are progressing. In addition to windroses, inspiration came from electron diagrams, with each project’s radius determined by its phase. Thus, as a project moves from concept to completion, you’ll see that it jumps from an inner position to an outer one. The specific phases are defined as follows:

1. Concept, proposal
2. Design development
3. Execution, fabrication
4. Revisions
5. Maintenance

When a project is completed or canceled, it gets a green or red dot, respectively.

So you can see that the first part of my year wasn’t bad, then things became periodically crazy, and finally reached a pretty consistent level, which (fingers crossed) show no signs of stopping… there’s a lot of work going on and a lot of work on hold as well (the dotted lines). Most of my canceled projects die in the concept phase… usually meaning that a proposal was rejected.

Right now, most of my work is web-based (or at least digital), but I can imagine this type of diagram working for all types of creative processes. See ya.

** UPDATE: I put the Processing version of this up on my newly redesigned portfolio. **

Kate Beaton makes amazing comics, mostly about historical persons of interest. Just thought you should know.

Barack Obama’s victory speech – New York Times

I’m feeling pretty good today. Anyone else?

The earth is painted blue, green, white, and brown
with ocean, leaves, clouds, and dust
And somewhere in this painting
there’s a painting just of us

- Atoms, Motion, and the Void, Episode 26

So there’s been a lot of talk about the “Bradley effect”… basically, the notion that white people will become suddenly uncomfortable voting for a black man at the polls. So here I am, 3am, making sure that the people in my building get any Bradley-like tendencies out of the way before leaving home.

So if you want to leave the building in the morning (from any of the six floors), you’re politely required to press the Obama button. And of course, on the ground floor, the names are flipped. If you want to take the elevator upstairs at the end of the day, you again have to vote for Barack. Get acquainted with that button now, press it again at the polls.

Let’s hope it helps all those trigger-shy moderates in my building…

Vote everyone! See you on the flip side! (of American history!)