Vitamins, a design studio in London, built themselves a Lego calendar. Photo: Vitamins It offers a tactile way to keep track of the months ahead--and it syncs with Google Calendar via smartphone snapshots. Photo: Vitamins "It was quite an iterative process, trying to find the right balance between physical and digital," says Adrian Westaway, the studio's director of technology. Photo: Vitamins "On one side you needed something big and clear that humans would like to use and look at--and on the other you needed something that was computer-readable and ordered." Lego, he says, offered the perfect compromise: bright, fun blocks that were fun for humans and consistent enough for computers. Photo: Vitamins "The white strips in the design and the color choice is directly based on the best results we got from various smartphone cameras," Westaway says. "The little figures are for us humans, to make us smile, sadly the computer just ignores them!" Photo: Vitamins A key they hide away for keeping track of which blocks correspond to which clients. Photo: Vitamins This is how the smartphone snapshot-processing software sees the board. Photo: Vitamins And another view. Photo: Vitamins And another: the chaos before the well-organized calm! Photo: Vitamins

"It was quite an iterative process, trying to find the right balance between physical and digital," says Adrian Westaway, the studio's director of technology. "On one side you needed something big and clear that humans would like to use and look at–and on the other you needed something that was computer-readable and ordered." Lego, he says, offered the perfect compromise: bright, fun blocks that were fun for humans and consistent enough for computers.

Of course, today, any calendar worth its salt needs a lifeline to the cloud, and Vitamins developed a clever solution for that, too. After snapping a new brick in place, the designers can snap a picture of the updated board with their phones, email it to an address, and a custom bit of software processes the update and dumps it into Google Calendar. "The white strips in the design and the color choice is directly based on the best results we got from various smartphone cameras," Westaway says. "The little figures are for us humans, to make us smile, sadly the computer just ignores them!"

The Lego is no gimmick, though. A calendar is only as useful as the information you put in it, and the plastic bricks offer an easy and enjoyable way for everyone to remain engaged. "The tactile element is really important," Westaway says. "We could have used anything, from whiteboards to paper and RFID tags, but the Lego was a really democratic starting point. So many organization systems we tried really force you to learn a complex system before beginning, whereas this is almost automatic."

>"We're trying to keep a tight balance between technology and magic."

It actually makes use of a surprisingly complex system: each of the three thick horizontal boards represents a month, with every column standing in for one day. Each person in the office has their own row within each month, denoted by their own personalized LEGO mini-fig, and every project is assigned a different color brick. Each brick represents a half day of work allotted for that client. The result is a plastic tapestry showing three months of work in one fell swoop–just enough data to see what's ahead but not so much that anyone risks losing track of what it all means.

The office has used the calendar for nearly a year to great success, though the system has evolved along the way. At some point, the designers started stacking Legos into little towers to mark important deadlines or big meetings. "Detecting depth is tricky with a smartphone, but we love using double bricks for meetings, so we do it anyway," Westaway says. Finding that sweet spot between a simple, human interaction and high-tech functionality is one of the challenges of developing a system like this, and while the studio has toyed with ideas like setting up a webcam to do syncing automatically, or adding a component of vocal annotations to bricks for more granularity, ultimately, he says, they wanted to err on the side of simplicity. "A lot of the decisions we made were trying to keep a tight balance between technology and magic," he says. "You could push it in either direction."

Vitamins plans to make their Lego-recognizing software freely available so other offices can tinker with the technology on their own. Still, no matter what features get added, the real magic is in the simple satisfaction that comes with snapping a brick to a plastic base. As Westaway points out, "how many times do people actually ask to use a calendar system?"

[Hat tip: Creative Applications]

Update: This project is now called the Bit Planner, and is being developed by Special Projects in London. The Bit Planner is an experiment, it is not a product and is not endorsed by LEGO in any way.