Plants We're Obsessed with

Vegetables
- Yacon
- Cardoon
- Quinoa and Amarinth (love lies bleeding)
- Chicory/endive/escarole/radiccio-what are they? what's a category of what? what do you do with them?
-Early Scarcity Beets
-Sugarloaf cabbage
-Long marrowfat peas

Fruit
-my architect friend Donna West just told me about "magic fruit"--a berry that makes everything taste sweet for one hour after you eat it. article from the NYTimes "The Miracle Fruit"

Herbs/Medicinal/Misc
-Mullein

Honesty

The Meaning of Odds & Ends (+ see also)

odds & ends
knick knacks
the ampersand as a punctuation mark poets and information architects can't live without.
what does it take to be a botanist?
blog in progress is a redundancy (what's that term)
study group: literary terms (word a day)
focus and the challenges of not doing it
meditation
blog as a series
blog as scrapbook
blog as storage bin/filing system
blog as communication technology

that when, 10 years ago, you thought 'ah that's really trendy now' you had no idea that it would be a cultural explosion / dependency now

future trendspotters: another of our specialties
- is it intuition, research/social involvement/community, or manifest destiny

self-determination and what it means

challenges of special characters on the internet (file under: ampersand)

psychological analysis of our blog posts

odds/ends

• better image posting workflow
• workflow diagrams!
• I KNOW WHY WE NEED TO BLOGS: because we only have a one-page website and this is the only way to have a second page
  

Taxonomy/Botany Notes

• What does it mean that a plant comes from the same family? What characteristics does that family tend to share, and what distinguishes them? (brassicas share the same leaf structure). Take a botany class?
• Do we want to make a taxonomy/glossary/tool related to the differences / similarities / overlap between different disciplines and terms?
  

Garden Experiments & Fun Projects

• Do we want to set up some lab trials to document how plant distance affects the plant (Note: "Control Group" is an interesting term to explore)?
• Try propagating various things
• Make beauty products from the garden (salt scrubs, etc.)
• Jam/jelly/canning?
• Make crazy old-fashioned foods?
  

Gaps in my Garden Knowledge

• Planting distance: How far apart do you really need to plant things? (I tend to ignore the directions on the packet and plant much closer together)
  
• Mulch: What is it really? What's the best kind?
• Seedling mix recipe (I've heard peat moss is bad for environment--draining bogs and wetlands--and also too acidic)
• What is pH really? (create a key /cheat sheet for identifying pH and adjusting soil pH)
• Worm compost vs. hot compost
• How to be more water-wise and ecologically conscientious in growing food (I think the Indians in SF at acorns. Would that be the real "macrobiotic" thing to eat --what's native to this area? What does it mean to have altered the landscape)
• Future gardens: Native plants, xeriscaping

For each species, I need to know

When to:
--start seeds
--transplant
--harvest
--collect seeds

Specimen Garden is making a calendar-tool.

Seasonal Ingredient Map

Seasonal Ingredient Map

Inpiration for My New Business Model

The Sheep Market

Map Iconography

We heart icons:


What do these icons say about (americans) (google) (designers)?

On Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs are an IA term, derived from Hansel & Gretel story (to find your way back home). It would be nice to use this here somehow, but usually it's within the context of a site with a navigation scheme (which unfortunately we can't easily create w/in Blogger).

e.g.
SPECIMEN GARDEN>CATALOG>Tagging notes (keyword selection)

Our Favorite Words & Concepts

Concepts
-The Conceptual Razor (my genius friend Ignazio Moresco came up with this; he does interaction design)
-Simplicity
-Instant readability/legibility
-10 minutes a day
-About-ness

Words
-Squint
-Blink

Our Favorite Subjects to Geek Out On

Terms information architects, librarians, and botanists love:
-Labels (terms, systems and physical objects used to catalog the garden, online, etc)
-Concordance/s
-Glossary/Lexicon
-Taxonomy/Ontology (species, genus, etc.)
-Field Guides
-Tools to Measure/Predict (Divining Stick, Weathervain, Thermometer...)
-Documentation

Information Design Challenges:
-Documenting Scale (show egg or hand in a photo to indicate its scale)
-Consistency in Nomenclature & Categorization
-Multi-lingual/internationalization
-Iconography

Hot Topics: Frontlines
-"Dashboards"
-All things eco (urban homesteading,...)
-Water conservation and the coming apocalypse
-Iconic indicators (=signage?)
-Literary terms (word of the day, the word that means a microcosm representing the larger topic)

To Do List

Online
-Post brainstorming notes
-Can we add a tag cloud to our blog
-Define our web 2.0 toolset (del.icio.us, flickr, etc.)
-Get our blog signature set up

Our Projects

1. Collect and Analyze Information Design Tools (a la Tufte)
2. Create Urban Homesteader Tool