Michael Mendez
design.mikemendez@gmail.com
Family Week
An always-on family calendar for a 27 inch portable touchscreen
The problem
We had a shared calendar synced across our phones, so the information existed, it just lived nowhere anyone could see it in person. Plans, appointments, whatever, somebody always found out at the worst possible moment. The challenge of having kids. A dedicated family display that solves this is expensive for what's basically a screen showing a calendar.
We had an LG StanbyME 2, a 27 inch portable touchscreen, so the question was whether I could turn it into something that answers "what's today, what's coming" from across the room.
Biggest constraint. I don't know how to write code.
This would be built through prompt iteration, clarity comes from action and mistakes.
I couldn't fall back on writing code myself, so I had to be genuinely clear about the problem up front.
I'm a product designer, but I wasn't focused on aesthetics here. Claude Design and Claude Code handled that since part of this was learning how far I can take it without being hands on.
Result
A native webOS app I sideloaded onto the device, bypassing the screen saver settings so our shared calendar is always on display. Color coding by event, dropping a family member's name into an event translates to a visual indicator on screen.
Profiles with a few extra features for my wife and me:
Responsive horizontal and vertical layouts
She gets a word of the day for vocabulary expansion
I get premarket futures and news headlines
Experimented with drawing and post-its for the kids, then quickly learned it was a distraction at early morning breakfast, so I removed it
A 14 day weather forecast, so we can pivot the kids' upcoming plans if we need to. Birthdays, anniversaries, and holiday reminders so I don't get stuck sleeping on the couch.
What I learned
My appreciation for engineers. I work with them daily, but my appreciation for the fact that they used to do all of this manually has 10x'd. I still don't know what good code hygiene is, and in this case it doesn't matter, it's for home. But I came out of this understanding what they do a lot better.
The unglamorous stuff is a lot of work. Recovering a backend I wiped, chasing the device across a network that kept reassigning its IP, getting deploys down to one command. Nobody puts that in a portfolio, but it's most of what shipping something yourself actually looks like.
AI can do some incredible things, and this is the worst it will ever be.
