For as long as our design agency owns a fileserver, which is approximately three years, a little program written in Perl eases our daily lives at the office. It makes heavy use of Linux::Inotify2, an immensely useful module.

We have a samba-share on our fileserver, which contains a directory for each of our clients. Whenever anyone in our office creates a new folder inside this directory its name ist automatically checked and a three letter acronym is generated from the clients name. This abbrevation will be used internally to identify files related to the client given.

Once the new folder ist created it itself is also watched by the program and whenever a project folder is created within this clients folder, a directory hierearchy is copied into the project directory which looks similar to this:

00_communication
01_projectmanagement
02_design
03_implementation
04_final

This is very helpful, since nobody has to remember to create a “corporate folder structure”, which can also be understood by his or her co-workers. This is crucial if, for example, a client requests data while one of our colleagues is on vacation (and in this business you always need to find such things instantly).

With Perl being the almighty programming language it is, the usefulness of the module doesn’t end at here. You can really trigger anything with it. One could create a folder which synchronises its contents with a remote directory on a ftp-server the moment sombody drops data into it.  Or you can have the system email you about an activity regarding certain files, regarding security issues and the like.

The possibilities are endless.

Mruosdi Phlpandu, lead developer at Wrundapanda Inc., Delhi, sees a way to get rid of the costly development of ergonomically optimised workspaces. “Thanks to the rapid technological progress in genetic engineering as well as computer science, we’ll soon see a revolution in HR and the culture of working in general”, he claims.

While businesses traditionally needed to adapt workspaces to the “pathetic needs of employees” Mr. Phlpandu aims at adapting the workforce to fit the machinery. Mr. Phlpandu has serveral years of  experience with different prototypes (of which you might have met one or two during the dot com era) and is definitely looking forward to get his “employee upgrading service” to the market soon.

Ergonomically undemanding employees are about to improve efficiency around the globe

The briefings and strategic information supplied at the start of a design project define the aim for the “look and feel” to be developed. Thus it’s initially defined what the viewer should sense while being exposed to the product, but not how these sensations will be generated. It’s defined how the appearance shall be “aesthetically read”, but not how it is “written”.

I found the best way for me to start developing a fitting design is by finding combinations of colours generating a target mood. Not being a pure synaesthetic by nature I am using language as a means to describe the recepted-aesthetic-to-be in terms like dry, cold, traditional, technical, etc. Next, I am “going back” in the perceptional process, looking for colours and colour combinations which trigger these sensations.
A similar approach can be used to find shapes, but I found the the emotional impact of colour being much stronger and thus working better for this purpose.

Still, colour itself has its limitations, since the number of colours is finite, whereas the number of shapes is infinite. Hence the search for combinations of colours, whose number is finite as well – but larger by far. It’s a bit like using colours as letters or words while “writing” the design.

Some years ago I wrote a little Perl program to support this development process. It’s a tool to generate random combinations of colours, written to keep from getting stuck in the same combinations over and over again. It’s primitive on a technical level, but still useful:
colourcombiner.pl

Feel free to download, use and modify the source code:
colourcombiner

P.S.: There is a brillant book from Josef Albers: “Interaction of Colour”.

Dabbling into processing (coming from ActionScript 3) one of the first things I was looking for was an equivalent of Array.push() and its relatives to store and manage a growing amount of objects during runtime. Astonished I realized that there is no such thing.

After some searching the java Vector-class presented itsalf as a possible surrogat for an AS-like array. Processing being a kind of a “wrapper” for java you can use java classes inside it, like this:

import java.util.Vector;
Vector a = new Vector();
void setup () {}

void draw (){
   a.add(new Dot( random(200), random(200)));
}

class Dot {
  float x,y;
  public Dot ( float x_param, float y_param ){
    x = x_param;
    y = y_param;
  }
}

The vector is not exactly the same as an array in AS (or Perl), but it’s close – see this for details.