Sometimes, it is kinda sad to see how far interaction design goes to emulate real world obstructions – obstructions that wouldn’t exist in digital form to begin with.

Let’s have a look at the calendar to the right. This is taken from a blog, and basically, it should be used as a way to navigate the archives. Days with actual posts would appear in blue. As you can see: this calendar has no links at all. Not much of a surprise since January has just begun.

So it isn’t actually helpful at all, in fact, this widget will just waste space for most of the month. The past month, as you can see, makes a bit more sense.

Humans have this nasty habit of chopping up time wherever they can. If you work with separate sheets of paper, you will end up dividing the days of the year in some way or other, and making the break on a month’s beginning is a sensible idea.

But in a digital world, we don’t work with sheets anymore. We can have a continuous stream of time if we want to. The sensible thing to do would actually make a calendar that shows me the days the author of a blog posted in the last four weeks. Yes, that would mean that there is a new month somewhere along that time – but why should it matter? Do you notice the change of month if you didn’t had a calendar to tell you so?

The sad thing is of course that interface designers seem to insist on those sheets. The sad thing is that nothing is gained with it, au contraire: it just makes handling multi-day events a hell of a nuisance.

What’s even worse is the fact that this is not even a very new idea: Alan Cooper writes about these things for some time now:

Has anything changed? Of course not …