Randy Sarafan defies easy description. He’s clearly a polymath of some sort, a provocateur

Mr. Sarafan has posted a recipe for a simple chalkboard-surfaced table on the outstanding  and ever-useful Instructables.com.

Chalkboard Table design by Randy Sarafan

While Sarafan’s design assumes Ikea trestles, this can be managed with sawhorses, or leaned against or mounted on a wall.The only indispensable items are chalkboard paint, a relatively smooth surface (Sarafan’s table was made of MDF) and chalk.

The point is that, with inexpensive, easily available materials, it’s possible to create a graphic representation of, for instance, a neighborhood – for planning purposes – or even in the midst of a crisis. While rolls of butcher paper are also available quickly, they’re not easily erased as revisions and updates are required. There are, of course, more sophisticated variations: magnetic white boards permit the use of objects and markers (for streets, vehicles, people); acetate overlays over maps permit drawing with grease pencils; GIS applications permit much more nuanced data manipulation.

But this will work-

and can be seen and worked on by more than one person at once – without electricity, without much more than a smooth surface, chalkboard paint, and chalk.

We’ll try to post some other variations on simple “sand-table” solutions in the near future.

Paint

Rustoleum makes chalkboard paint in brush-on and spray versions; it’s my guess that the fastest construction would involve spray paint or canned paint using a roller to create a thinner, quicker-drying coat. Rustoleum suggests 24 hours for drying. A hair dryer might work to accelerate the drying process.(Rustoleum’s spray-on version comes only in black; the brush-on version, in black or green).

Dick Blick carries Krylon chalkboard paint in green and black (spray, $4.99 12 ounces)), black only (regular can, $11.99 29 ounces)

Craft At Home has a recipe for making your own chalkboard paint from acrylic paint, glazing medium and tile grout. via Lifehacker.

See also:

Simple tools for planning

Sand Table and Modeling: Supplies and resources

1. (To be more precise, many of “Laszlo Toth’s” letters were, in fact, answered
2. Bob Garfield interviews Don Novello about the Laszlo Letters on the WNYC show On The Media

Austhink, an Australian software firm, makes a package called Rationale,  which makes it easy to create diagrams of rhetorical and decision-making processes.

I downloaded a trial version last-night – and immediately started using it to map risk risks associated with energy production. I plan on using it in my work here at Popular Logistics and elsewhere. Which is to say – I think I’m already using it for an off-label purpose.

It’s as easy to use as any graphics program – outputs to a variety of graphic formats. And so far, I’m quite impressed. Since we test software principally to recommend them to community-based groups on zero budgets – we’ve got a strong bias for free software – but at $69 USD this may be an exception.

The people at Austhink think this is an educational tool. They’re right about that – it could be used from grammar school on up. And certainly in law school. But I think it’s got applications in planning and risk assessment.

Worth a look. Learned about this at Social Source Commons.

My first thought was how intuitive and elegant an interface:

Low tech technology like index cards, colored sticker dots and a whiteboard is a fast way to visualize and change a plan. The Digital Planning Board is not meant as a replacement of this but as a tool for distributed teams, enhanced client communication and quicker storage and search functionality.

Using User Stories To Define Tasks
The work planned for an iteration is divided into tasks with a clearly defined deliverable and these tasks are represented as User Stories. User stories are represented by story cards and will not hold all information about a given task but enough information to remind involved parties what the requirements are. Ron Jeffries describes it as “The card is a token representing the requirement”.

The Basic Rules of a Planning Board
A planning board is managed using these basic rules:

• A lane represent a person or a team.
• Blocks represent a task
• The size of a block displays the estimated time to complete the task.

But Arb’s designers took this many steps further – ending up with an interface which looks like this:

Demo here

. Larger explanation and further resources here.

Arb Design Main Page here .