I’ve been a fan of Edward Tufte, the grandmaster of the infographic and Professor Emeritus at Yale University, ever since I first read his book “Envisioning Information”. In that book, Tufte, a statistician by trade, tries to answer a serious question that’s of interest to everyone from scientists and architects to doctors and designers – how can you represent complex, dynamic, multidimensional information through a two-dimensional surface (i.e., screen or paper)? It’s a big question that Tufte endeavors to answer by extracting general principles from the study of various examples, both good and bad, such as Galileo and Euclid’s drawings, Japanese weather maps and American hospital bills.

Tufte explains information design best, so I’ll let him lay it out for you:

“To envision information… is to work at the intersection of image, word, number, art. The instruments are those of writing and typography, of managing large data sets and statistical analysis, of line and layout and color. And the standards of quality are those derived from visual principles that tell us how to put the right mark in the right place.” – From the “Envisioning Information” introduction

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Over the last year or so, Mindsalt has outgrown our office at 1503 Story Ave. So when we heard about an old warehouse that was being renovated nearby, we took a look at the space and were impressed by the potential we saw – lots of raw space, reclaimed building materials, and the opportunity to design and build out an office from scratch. To a group of designers, that’s pretty tempting. So as of mid-October, mindsalt’s new office will be located in Butchertown Pointe. The building is also shared by other tenants in the creative industries, including interior designers, photographers, a modeling agency, and web designers and developers (including our friends at Visual Scientists).

Mike’s been working on the architectural plans and renderings, a sneak peek of which you can see below.

Entryway to the new office

View from inside

View from the back

The guy with the gross hair is just there for scale. (You’d be surprised how  hard it is to find good 3d models of people who don’t look like early 90s rockers.) You can see a few of the neat features we have planned – there’s a loft area with a cafe table, and a conference room that’s enclosed on one side by a garage door. We also have a lounge area and a bar/kitchen space, and lots of open space in which to hold our Wii Tennis tournaments. When all is said and done, the space will house five people and one dog with room to grow. We’ll be posting updates as the work on the space progresses.

Related Link: Butchertown Pointe

at long last, the quonset hut woodshop is fully equiped and making dust. newly added are a 10″ cabinet saw, 12″ mitre saw, 8″jointer, 15″ planer, 18″ bandsaw, heavy duty lathe, drill press, mortiser, spindle sander, drum sander, and dust collection (not to mention all the hand tools i’ve been collecting over the years). thanks to ruby electric for the power,  josh for the lights and brian for the garage door opener.

7 years (plus) of working/learning in ted harlan’s shop and 3 volkswagens later and the dream shop is complete (thanks to the sale of the 56 truck).

and the first job outside of making jigs, lumber storage and other not-so-fun-stuff was to build a scale model for a line of furniture we are trying to get sold into a large national retailer (at their request). it’s a multi-purpose grouping that can convert either from a coffee table to a bench or an end-table to a chair. we’re hopeful they commit to a purchase, but we’re pretty happy that their this interested even if they don’t – there’s lots to learn from the experience, plus we have our first patent. and, most importantly, it’s just plain fun. below are some images of the design process in action along with the miniatures that shipped saturday:

in the same vain, we’re also looking to prototype our prior foray into furniture design – the arcliner series (a foldable, stackable line made from bent wood laminates):