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.

check out thesis website : Marginalia: The Hybrid Textbook

Conductive Marginalia from Chris R Becker on Vimeo.

The video prototype concept utilizes the conductive inks I have been experimenting with to generate interactive switches that are designed with in the margins of the narrative. The conductive switches illicit the context of the footnote for the narrative. The switch both lights up an embedded LED in the page and also triggers a screen / projection / smart phone message that could be accessed simultaneously through out the narrative. The content is a short story from David Foster Wallace’s Interviews with Hideous Men : Suicide as a Sort of Present. David Foster Wallace is an author the has utilized the footnote context annotation through out his body of work especially Infinite Jest

check out thesis website : Marginalia: The Hybrid Textbook