Man, talk about a big undertaking. This graphic from the New York Times illustrates an attempt to redesign the Periodic Table by Jeff Moran of Woodstock, New York.

Moran's redesign addresses the ultimate problem with the existing design: it doesn't scale with the discovery of new elements. The new design attempts to solve this by arranging the elements in a kind of spiral pattern that can grow with time. This also seems to create a nice parallel to the structure of the Milky Way Galaxy (how meta).

Another problem is that the current table has difficulty showing the relationship between the elements. It's for this reason that the new design emits from Hydrogen, which shares many properties with the other elements. This seems to make the correlations a little more apparent.

This article and the process surrounding it made me think of another article I was reading recently about IDEO and their design process. The IDEO approach and this redesign of the Periodic Table are similar in that they focus on the process of understanding the problem. The US News article about IDEO gives specific examples of this, but in the case of the Periodic Table, imagine trying to attempt the redesign without knowing the properties of the elements. Getting "inside" the problem is extremely important. Don't hear about the problem, experience the problem. Don't ask the user, become the user. If you can achieve that, your likelihood of success is much higher. And in this case, you could make a lot of 11th grade chemistry students very happy.