Spanish designer Oscar Diaz has designed a calender that uses the capillary action of ink spreading across paper to display the date.
The ink is absorbed slowly, and the numbers are printed daily. One a day, until the end of the month.
He uses different colored ink for each month to symbolize the changing seasons.
The calender enhances the visualization of time passing and not just signaling it.
I wonder how long it must have taken Diaz to determine the weight, density, and the size of the embossed numbers in the paper needed to have the ink spread to two characters every 24 hours.
Although currently just a museum piece, maybe we could someday have our own. Then again, if we lived our days to the fullest, we wouldn’t need to watch them dwindle away on paper. Sometimes that’s easier said than done.
