Let’s say you would live for 100 years, and you would start to use calendar from day one. In this case, you would use at least 100 normal calendars, maximum 44 Calendar Rolls, or, 1 New Calendar.
And that’s not the end of the story. After 100 years, you can surely pass your New Calendar to someone else who can surely pass the no-longer-yours New Calendar further down.
What’s the actual lifespan of a New Calendar? We don’t know.
It has three layers. From top to bottom, they are transparent film (plastic), printed synthetic paper (plastic) and magnet. Plastic takes 1000 years to decompose in landfill; magnet loses 50% capacity in 700 years. So we can’t make a ‘forever’ guarantee. However, as long as there’s no significant break-through in life science and you don’t do weird things to it, you shouldn’t be able to see the day your New Calendar going dysfunction—unfortunately.
Allow us to explain the mechanism, or principle, to those who haven’t acquainted with Calendar Roll yet: according to our scientific observation, if we vertically divide a calendar into seven strips, we can use these strips to form any month of any year.
Make them into a roll (scotch tape in fact), it’s Calendar Roll; make them into fridge magnets, it’s calendar magnets, oh no, New Calendar.
We’ve been using New Calendar for a year and half.
In June 2017, we made the first prototype with card board. We felt it worked and decided to use it everyday. Soon we were searching for manufacturers to produce it. After having our manufacturer on board, we asked our friends in Shanghai, Han and Fang, both architects, nice couple, to do quality control. Architect does have eyes as sharp as peregrine’s. Quicker than we had expected, their refrigerator has been fully swarmed by samples with one hundred different kinds of flaw… Thank you guys!
Yoko’s mom was commissioned to check final products. She examined them one by one (over 1,000 pieces), sent back defective ones, examined newly received ones, sent back still-defective ones, and again… Thank you mom!
On February 2018, tao went back to china, touched the real thing for the first time. He took the final batch with minor problems and visited our manufacturer in Guangzhou. It was a fruitful trip. Not only he saw the machines and the hands being involved, he also had a complete understanding of the making process, therefore he knew what are the key parameters which might hamper the quality of end product or diminish the beauty of making process which we value as equally much as the product itself.
Two weeks later, tao returned home. We replaced the prototype with the real one. We were happy about the final thing.
Based on our experience of using New Calendar, we found three things worthy to share:
- We see it every day, numerous times. In this one year and half, we had never interacted with another calendar as much as this, smartphone calendar with no exception. Apart from being informed by it, we got inspirations from time to time.
- Moving ‘Today’ by hand makes us feel so good. For now, our today mark is a bear magnet bought a decade ago from a flee market in China. Every morning, any moment from getting off bed to tidying up breakfast table, one of us would definitely move today-bear one day forward: yes, today is a new day! Digital calendar kindly does this for us, but it’s such a shame to let computer who can never get a sense of fulfilment or contemplation to do this.
- New Calendar is for sharing. Friends visiting us would always automatically notice it: “What’s this?” We would explain a bit, they would confuse a bit, we would ask them to transform this month into next month, they would “aha!”, whisper or shout out. At last, we would end up the game by inviting them to show us a leap-year’s February with 20th being Thursday.
We brought very limited numbers to Italy, so we won’t make a public sale for now. Drop us an email (pia[at]claudeverett.org) if you want to buy it!