All posts in Design

Zombies, Beards and Infographics

Beards infographic

For the past year or so, I’ve been making a lot of infographics, mostly for Goal Investor, a website that’s geared towards helping Gen X and Gen Y understand investing better.  The site features a really cool tool to help you work out just how much you should be savings for goals like retirement and education, and it also provides lots of education in the form of articles and infographics.  That’s the part I’ve been helping with.  You can see some of the stuff I’ve been creating here, here and here.

In the Spring, a good friend of mine asked me if I’d be interested in doing a workshop on the use of infographics in education at her school in New Hampshire.  She teaches English to high school kids at Pittsfield Middle High School, a school where they’re doing some truly groundbreaking work in rethinking education.  In addition to creating very cool hands-on learning opportunities for students and making strides in conflict resolution through their work in restorative justice (which my friend is heavily involved in), a grant has enabled them to offer workshops to teachers and students alike on a variety of topics.  Teachers can identify topics and presenters they think would provide useful, cross-disciplinary, project-based workshops, and funding is provided through the grant.  Needless to say, when she approached me about this, I jumped at the chance, as it combined two things that I’m passionate about, design and teaching.

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Analog Work in a Digital Age

Instructions from Ray

For quite some time I’ve known–and from time to time have worked with–a man named Ray, who is quite possibly one of the most amazing people I’ve ever met.  Not only does he have an encyclopedic knowledge of mechanical and industrial engineering, but he holds numerous patents, has a wonderful sense of humor and until recently, commuted back and forth from the Jersey Shore to Bethlehem, PA on a weekly basis (at what must be about the ripe old age of 90) to continue to do engineering work at Lehigh University.  This is a man who has devoted his life to problem solving and seemingly greets each day with the excitement of having another opportunity to design, to improve and to invent.  It’s quite remarkable, really.

The other thing you should know about Ray is that he doesn’t have e-mail or really use the computer.

This last point has, admittedly, caused me some frustration over the years, especially when we are working on projects together.  Although invention (and presumably, technological progress) is very much part of what makes him who he is, it seems to me that he longs for the days when phone calls and face-to-face conversations were how business got done.  I would bet that if I asked him, he would say there’s no replacement for real, live human interaction.  And that is part of what simultaneously confounds me and endears him to me.

So when he approached me about doing some design work for his latest invention, I knew that the process was going to have to work differently than it usually does for me.  It was going to be decidedly analog.

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