With the release of Apple’s iPad (joke with standing) there was the buzz of technological potential all around the interwebs. Apple has the potential to make game changing devices and with a track record of the iPod, iPhone, and iMac it is hard not to argue with their ability to produce and create a mobs of loyal and dedicated fans. The iPad may not be the replacement to the laptop which many in the Nerd-o-sphere hoped it would and a nice review has been posted by Phil Van Allen (http://www.philvanallen.com/news/its-not-a-laptop-what-people-are-missing-about-the-ipad/)
The iPad is a platform system one not to unfamiliar to the iPhone, the device becomes a conduit for the apps to which it runs. This is the success model that has produced revolution in mobile communication. As for the types of apps that the iPad will start to inherit, I believe that some will greatly enhance the user and engage at a much different experience level that a laptop ever could.
On the other hand, the iPad is still a screen a back lit screen with multitouch software based apps it is not a book, or a news paper, or a manual. Now matter how you cut or change the app it is still a pixel. Not to say that it is not a very effective and useful screen, no but to see or try and utilize it as if it were not a screen is a vast mistake.
Take the book store example that is highlighted in the images with in this post. The metaphor of a books and its physical attributes of paper are being replicated with in the experience of the screen interface. The book application starts to engage the user as if with in that particular app they are interacting with paper; however, this has missed the opportunity to engage the affordance of the screen. A screen is not a book and a book is not a screen. The ironic thing is that technologies as advanced as the iPad are trying to be a book instead of being what they really are, a screen.
Knowledge is embodied in people gathered in communities and networks. The road to knowledge is via people, conversations, connections and relationships. Knowledge surfaces through dialog, all knowledge is socially mediated and access to knowledge is by connecting to people that know or know who to contact.
Denham Grey
Print material including books, magazines, periodicals, newspapers, and comics have all come under the threat of being relegated to the trash due to networked screen technologies. Technologies such as the Kindle, Nook, future tablet PC’s and smart phones have greatly diminished the market share of print material. As technologies move forward and interaction with print material becomes lessened, the question should be how did this happen? it should be why has print material not adapted and become a link between ink and screen?
Reading is a uniquely a singular interaction, but knowledge and comprehension are communal. Hybrid Plus will be a design platform and series of prototypes that incorporate the communal aspects of reflection, knowledge, and comprehension into the experience of the individual act of reading. The prototypes will engage the social interaction and ecology of book clubs, study clubs, and educational groups. Hybrid Plus will give interaction to the physical pages of books and build shared spaces within the margins for reflection, passive communication, and collective comprehension. When the margins of books and literature are shared what does the margin become? a communication space? A passive location to challenge a social exchange? A reflection space for many? A space to engage the content deeper with in a group? The prototypes will engage both built and speculative outcomes. Physicality is an essential experience to books and literature and the prototyping of conductive inks and networked pages builds upon this affordance .
The project rather then replacing the physical book with intangible data, incorporates the technological advances of networked pages, shared margin spaces, and physical interaction into the experience of the printed artifact as a way to explore the space between printed material and the screen.
When different media and different contexts are tightly intertwined, no artifact can stand as a single isolated entity. Every single artifact becomes an element in a larger ecosystem. All these artifacts have multiple links or relationships with each other and have to be designed as part of one single seamless user experience process.
2. Users become intermediaries
Users are now contributing participants in these ecosystems and actively produce new content or remediate existing content by ways of mashups, commentary, or critique. The traditional distinction between authors and readers, or producers and consumers, becomes thin to the point of being useless and void of meaning.
All build new relationships and meanings by means of mashups, aggregators, and social networking tools, and all agents contribute content through the crowdsourcing leveraged by the Web via wikis, blogs, and other participatory tools, and mobile devices.
3. Static becomes dynamic
On one hand, these architectures aggregate and mashup content which physically may reside elsewhere and which might heave been released for completely different purposes. On the other hand, the active role played by intermediaries makes them perpetually unfinished, perpetually changing, and perpetually open to further refinement and manipulation.
4. Dynamic becomes hybrid
These new architectures embrace different domains (physical, digital, and hybrid), different types of entities (data, physical items, and people), and different media. As much as the boundaries separating producers and consumers grow thin, so do those between different media and genres. All experiences are crossmedia bridgeexperiences across a breadth of different environments.
5. Horizontal prevails over vertical
In these new architectures correlation between elements becomes the predominant characteristic, at the expenses of traditional topdown hierarchies. In open and everchanging architectures hierarchical models are difficult to maintain and support, as intermediaries push towards spontaneity, ephemeral or temporary structures of meaning, and constant change.
6. Product design becomes experience design
When every single artifact, be it content, product, or service, is a part of a larger ecosystem, focus shifts from how to design single items to how to design experiences spanning processes. Everyday shopping does not concern itself with the retail shop only, but configures an experience process which might start on traditional media with a television commercial or newspaper advertisement, might continue on the Web with a research for comments or for locating the nearest convenience store, might proceed to the shop to finalize a purchase, and finally returns to the Web for assistance, updates, customization, and networking with other people or devices.
7. Experiences become cross-media experiences
Experiences bridge multiple connected media and environments into ubiquitous ecologies. One single unitarian process where all parts contribute to the final, seamless user experience.
I am usually not a manifesto person, I have at least been critical of the prominence of the communist manifesto, the constructivist manifesto, the futurist manifest, the situationist manifesto, etc, etc but the 7 premises established in the Pervasive Information Architecture Book seem to rub against the ideas of creating hybrid experiences that extend and engage the existing ecology’s of book and screen culture. I am hoping that my prototypes will start to hint at the extent of some of these premises within the creation of products and services in the face of ubiquitous computation.
In the New York Times article Kevin Kelly lays out the arguement that culture is under going a paradigm shift.
“Now invention is again overthrowing the dominant media. A new distribution-and-display technology is nudging the book aside and catapulting images, and especially moving images, to the center of the culture. We are becoming people of the screen. The fluid and fleeting symbols on a screen pull us away from the classical notions of monumental authors and authority. On the screen, the subjective again trumps the objective. The past is a rush of data streams cut and rearranged into a new mashup, while truth is something you assemble yourself on your own screen as you jump from link to link. We are now in the middle of a second Gutenberg shift — from book fluency to screen fluency, from literacy to visuality.” Kevin Kelly
The ubiquity of screens is a force that is undisputable. The iphone alone sold 21.17 million in 2009 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone). Now the access to screens and networked technology has unearthed a vast and unwealdy beast that has left entrenched media gasping for air. With many companies opting for abandoning ship rather then shifting or recognizing a location for improvement or cohabidance.
Capitalism thrives on competition and what better competition then between paradigms right? Kevin Kelly coments that in the age of computation we have entered that age of screen fluency, this in fact may be true but the line of thinking that book knowledge and screen knowledge or mutually exclusive undermines the ability of screen literacy to convey meaning. Oral culture may have been commodified by the literature and literature may be commodified by the motion picture and motion pictures may be commodified by screen and software but they are all connected. The separation from media type to media type is not fundimentally different. The two paradigms share the ability to convey knowledge through metaphor, storytelling and emotion. The difference is the speed and experience of that media.
Books are slow, pragmatic, (sometimes) linear and require exisiting visual experience to impact the narrative and comprehension, while screens are fast, hyper-linked, variable and use visual experience to impact. Books are quiet and blind, while screens are hyper and loud.
The Cronotope is a working prototype evolved from a methodology of thinking and design research which builds upon the book experience and ecology of book culture. The project rather then replacing the physical book with intangible data, incorporates the technological advances of networked pages, shared margin spaces, and physical interaction into the experience of the printed artifact as a way to explore the space between printed material and the screen.
Reading is uniquely a singular interaction but knowledge and comprehension are communal. The Cronotope is a system and design platform that incorporates the communal aspects of reflection, knowledge, and comprehension into the experience of the individual act of reading. As a system, the Cronotope will engage the social interaction and ecology of book clubs, study clubs, and educational groups. Through giving interaction to the physical pages of a book and building shared spaces for reflection, the engagement of comprehension becomes a shared event. When the margins of books and literature are shared what does the margin become, a communication space? A passive location to challenge a social exchange? A reflection space for many? A space to engage the content deeper with in a group?
The Cronotope is an outcome of seeing print material replaced and disregarded by its technological brethren. Print material including books, magazines, periodicals, newspapers, and comics have all come under the treat of being relegated to the trash due to networked screen technologies. Technologies such as the Kindle, Nook, future tablet PC’s and smart phones have greatly diminished the market share of print material. As technologies move forward and interaction with print material becomes lessened, the question should be how did this happen? it should be why has print material not adapted and become a link between ink and screen? The Cronotope is a system that uses prototyped conductive inks along with networking capabilities to explore and engage the experience of literature and its physicality as essential to its media type.
The Cronotope is named from the concept developed by Russian philologist and literary philosopher M.M. Bakhtin who used the term to designate the spatio-temporal matrix, which governs the base condition of all narratives and other linguistic acts. The term itself can be literally translated as “time-space.” The term is developed in Bakhtin’s essay published in English as “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel.”
Knowledge is embodied in people gathered in communities and networks. The road to knowledge is via people, conversations, connections and relationships. Knowledge surfaces through dialog, all knowledge is socially mediated and access to knowledge is by connecting to people that know or know who to contact.
Denham Grey
If its not a screen make it one with a projector. Technologies are moving onto every surface. With a projector and software, interacting with computation can occur anywhere. It is really unimportant what the material is as long as it can have an image projected onto it, anything can be the new computer. The notion that any wall or surface can be a computer or interface with which to engage with computation establishes a value on the visual outcome of a computer. A computer and its interface can be boilded down to just light projected on a surface.
A computer is a type of machine and exisits with in the applied history and design spectrum of other machine. When a computer becomes just a screen or just light on a surface it neglects to recognize the importance of many aspects that make the use of a machine useful fun or engaging. Take haptics for example.
Haptics (pronounced HAP-tiks) is the science of applying touch (tactile) sensation and control to interaction with computer applications. (The word derives from the Greek haptein meaning “to fasten.”) By using special input/output devices (joysticks, data gloves, or other devices), users can receive feedback from computer applications in the form of felt sensations in the hand or other parts of the body. In combination with a visual display, haptics technology can be used to train people for tasks requiring hand-eye coordination, such as surgery and space ship maneuvers. It can also be used for games in which you feel as well as see your interactions with images. For example, you might play tennis with another computer user somewhere else in the world. Both of you can see the moving ball and, using the haptic device, position and swing your tennis racket and feel the impact of the ball.
Light as a phonomonia is untangible. One can not touch light the heat they feel from lets say a light bulb is altogether a different sensation but the bodies ability to use the sense of touch to establish knowledge about an object becomes a strong and useful tool for interaction. Interaction with a projection on a wall or table or whatever just becomes interacting with light an altogether difficult thing. A user is not really interacting with anything rather the computer is recognizing the limited physical space to which is being projected and then compensating though the use of software and mostlikely infrared sensors located in the projector. This technology assumes that the interface of a key board is just too bulky and should be illiminated or disregarded as an experience from the interaction with the computer. However the interface and interaction with the keyboard is entirely a learned interaction and has been evolved from the collective consiousness of the typewriter and education itself. A vast and nuanced history that has both been accepted and retaught an established truth of interface. The QUERTY is not going to redically change but somehow the idea that the physical interaction with keys is unuseful for a user of a computer negelts the ablity of the brain to memorize phyiscal space and repeat actions known as muscle memory. The phyiscality of even the simple keys to which this post has been made would have been a much different experience for my hands if I were just to project the letters onto a surface. I would imagine that my fingertips would hurt after pounding them on to a hard surface and that I would have to use more of my sight in order to correctly locate my fingers over the keyboard. The ability of a keyboard to have sutle haptic clues allows me as a user to orient my self to the interface of the keyboard with much more ease. I am speaking of the tiny raised dashes on the f and j keys. Any thing projected can’t accomplish this nuanced yet setting and orienting feature of the keyboard.
I am dismayed by the thinking that a screen is that answer to all our needs when interacting with computation. What would a computer be if it was not screen? why do we need to interact with computation only in the visible sense? Why have computer moved away from the machines you engage and experience and into the the real of only see? All these question arise when I am confronted by technologies that imply and attempt to bring to truth that a computer is really just a screen when I think that it could be so much more such a better experience that light on a surface.
As technologies progresses and rumors of tablet computers continue to circulate through out the Internet and hardware prediction sites, companies like Coursesmart (http://www.coursesmart.com/) a digital textbook company has attempted to prototype and show the potential of these new systems and their impact on education. The textbook industry and subsequent educational materials have been dominated by print industries and through this process have created an ecology of textbooks for student and an experience that prepares the students for the upcoming semester of learning and education. The purchasing and exchange of books at colleges and universities is a tradition that is unique in its own right. The system of textbook sales and resales is one that encourages reuse and resale depending on the print industry who sees the opportunity to reprint new additions as a way to bolster profits. Personally I loved buying used textbooks and would peruse the pages to see how studious the prior student had been. I always felt privileged to have the extra marginalia knowledge that was left behind by particular students. This marginalia is sometimes damaging to the text book but other times helped me work though difficult challenging questions about the material. Take the physics textbook from the tablet demo, at Colorado State University where I went to undergrad, all students were required to fulfill a science credit even for majors of Fine Art to which I completed in 2004. As a student I am not strong in mathematics this lead me to know that physics was going to be a challenging course. I remember being the first student to the used physics 101 books and made sure that I got the best used textbook with the most useful notes in the marginalia. The existing use of the text book allowed me to access a alternative knowledge space that was extremely helpful when studying. The Coursesmart prototype shows the ability to leave notes and highlight but neglects the notion that notes and marginalia are not always a singular action. At the time of being made they are for the user engaged in the content but once left they have an impact on future users as a extension of the knowledge within the textbook. Now if the CourseSmart system could be networked with other classmates and the notes and commentary could be shared over a social network then that might make the use of the tablet system more engaging. Studying is a unique interaction because it requires the ability to move both from singular action usually memorization to the more complication comprehension which can and sometimes require a social aspect. How do you know you understand something? Ask someone else who is trying to understand the same thing if you both come to the same outcomes than comprehension has occurred barring the person you ask has come to the correct conclusion. Answers have a much different dimension depending on the subject but take simple math you either conclude that 5 x 5 is 25 or you don’t but you can test it over and over and then define that it is indeed true. There is the saying the you really understand something when you can teach it (help someone else comprehend it).
Comprehension of knowledge in a textbook is understood through testing within pedagogy. However the route to the comprehension is individual like a snowflake. In my education, testing ie choose A, B, C, D was never a great metric for comprehension of the material, but when I was asked in written form what do I understand about the subject I used much more information to which was gather through not just memorizing answers but synthesising both lectures, studying and conversations with fellow students. When I was asked to explain the process or show my comprehension that is where I was more successful as long as I comprehended the content. Now comprehension is a complicated notion of education and the scientific method would suggest (and can be seen in current educational trends) that memorization is the precursor to comprehension. If you can memorize facts then you can eventually follow the right procedure and develop comprehension, hopefully. For me I always considered the experience of memorization a fleeting education because the process never stuck, I have a hard enough time remembering peoples names, but can for some reason recall obscure facts about the conversation we shared. I believe this is due to the fact that my individual process of comprehension deals with an experience and I will remember more when engaged in remembering the experience rather that a specific element with that whole. I have had a number of experiences where I can recall the how, where, when, and what happened, but can remember the name.
Education is really about comprehension and tools that engage the understanding of content should be more versed and in my opinion should be realized through making tools and services that engage the experience of comprehension not just a singular element of the educational access with apparently starts with the textbook and memorization.
