Seeing the letters is just the start of the reading process. Although our eyes are focused on the letters, we learn to ignore them. Instead, we perceive whole words, chunks of meaning. Once we become proficient at reading, the precise shape of the letters — not to mention the arbitrariness of the spelling — doesn’t even matter, which is why we read word, WORD, and WoRd the same way.
Until now most assumed that when we read both eyes look at the same letter of a word concurrently. But it was found that our eyes look at different letters in the same word and then combine the different images through a process known as fusion. We were able to clearly show that we experience a single, very clear and crisp visual representation due to the merging of the two different images from each eye.
Language tends to be stored in the brain to be processed in audio format, so besides reading the text we automatically convert it to speech in our own heads. After that the process of making sense takes place.
Studies have shown that when a word is checked against the storehouse of words in the brain – whether it is a written word or a word-sound – only the main part of the word is checked first, and then the ending is processed separately. For example, ‘sing’, ‘singing’ and ‘singer’ would all be checked against the base word ‘sing’.
Once we recognized the printed words we need to make sense out of them. Understanding how meaning arises from those words is of the most challenging tasks in cognitive sciences.
More on making sense and meanings can be found here and here.
There is an ongoing debate whether the new kind of reading experience provided by internet is beneficial or not. Some interesting articles are worth exploring: Is Google making us stupid and How is Google making us smarter. It would be interesting to incorporate the last scientific findings about how or brain reads in order to draw new and more accurate conclusions.
“Deep Attention” is characterized by the ability to concentrate on a single object for long periods of time. While “Hyper Attention” is the ability to focus on multiple tasks switching between each with relative ease and speed. Each style is considered a cognitive mode and is fostered and afforded by the media which gave rise to its birth. “Deep attention” can be attributed to the book while “Hyper Attention” is equated with the internet. These cognitive modes are looked at as being diabolically opposed similarly to the discussion that a rises around print vs screen technologies. However what if these cognitive modes could be gaped? How could hyper attention assist deep attention and vice versa? What would this media start to look like?
I believe that cognitive modes of attention should be versatile like that of Leonardo device as a Renaissance man. The educational and pedagogical stance should embrace the two parts of cognition and build services and tools that enable the ability and affordance of each. When knowledge is not valued over its ability to be fast or slow what does is become?
Deep attention, the cognitive style traditionally associated with the humanities, is characterized by concentrating on a single object for long periods
Computation seems to be in a second stage of evolution. As we move into a world where computation power is compact and millions of people are carrying super computers in there pockets, the computer has started to remove us from behind a desk. The potential of mobile computing has started to engage the user and the physical world in exciting possibilities. If the purpose of computation at our fingertips is to allow us connection to the information cloud, then what is the form that that connection should take? Mark Weiser famously quoted in his essay : The Computer For the 21st Century
“the most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.”
The interesting part is technologies start to change everyday life. Cell phones are no longer just phones but their ability to be that mode of communication has allowed the access of other interventions and introductions of computers into the hand and away from behind a desk.
A computer can’t be a piece of paper but that doesn’t mean a computer can’t incorporate paper. If books and print material could be used in the same fashion with their simplicity of interaction ie the turning of pages but have the advantage of a social counterpart, then computing would have the ability to become indistinguishable in everyday use by making the use of the book fit with the use of the computer.
he most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.
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.
There is a fundamental difference between the experience of a print media and screen based media. As screen based technologies become more and more pervasive, it is refreshing to see some design companies ie Bonnier considering the particular affordances of the media devices that they attempting to prototype. The affordances of the screen are those at which print material can not possess but there is always a trade off. Bonnier is making a valid argument that if magazine content is going to delivered on a screen, then that screen should deliver a unique experience relatively independent of its magazine predecessor. That is not to say that the screen is devoid of design elements and layout principals that have garnished the vast history of magazine publishing, but rather that those design elements and layout principles be modified to fit the device. Form follows function and the function of a screen is not that of a book or magazine. To exchange the values of a book experience complete with printed ink, paper and sequential pages with that of a screen and expect the user to just accept the convenience and portability of that screen ignores that unique opportunity to make something new. Screen experience design is in its beginning stages and has struggled to separate it self from is print based counterpart. The technology of printing and books has not adapted to the technologies of desktop computing. There has been an extreme leap from the printed page to the screen and in this leap many interactions and experiments with combined media have been left out. Personal Computing expectations and device production has left print design in its coat tails, but the expectation of experience is still lagging behind with the print world. Bonnier is a least attempting to realize and research the unique affordance of a screen based magazine and not just transport a magazine onto the screen.
Apple is selling record numbers of downloadable games for the iPhone and iPod Touch. This is attracting publishers because the lack of physical media is better economically for both consumers and video game creators (November 12)
Microsoft is set to open up the XBox 360 to user-generated games on November 19, all of which will only be available via download – there will be no DVDs (October 30)
The bullet list is a few examples of technologies and media delivery platforms that currently or will in the future deminish print media’s market share or potentially eliminate it all together. Print Media platformes of books, magazines, posters, etc etc are talked about in term of being Tangible Media.
The description of tangible is defined as capable of being perceived especially by the sense of touch.
The materiality of paper and ink in all is variety from newsprint to gompy has earned print media the use of that terminology with in its description. Media delivery devices like the kindle, the iphone etc are tangible. To suggest that they are not assumes that the ability to touch a screen ie a pixel is not equal with that of prior physical object (artifacts) like books for instance.
The reasoning behind referencing print material as “Tangible Media” and technologies like the Kindle as being something different is really located with in the process of experience. Tangible when describing a book is referencing the experience a user has engage with that media type for the time they were a child to current interactions. Paper has texture, color, smell, it can be flooded and imprinted or debossed the list goes on and on. Tangible becomes a catch all for the experience of turning pages in a seqential artifact and emcompasses the notions of age, use and variety. When tangible is used for the iPhone, Kindle or technologies, it is used more as a description of functionality of the interface. Because a screen is just pixels that can be anything, the experience of that tangible experience is fundimentally different then that of the experience with print media, and rightly so!
The issue is then the expectation that a book can be on a screen and contain the same experience? There is a compromise when “tangible media” is traded for “tangible pixel”, the experience of the can only be mimicked or hinted at through acknologment in either direction. The ability to have animated turning pages in a pdf is an example of a media type not sure how to accept its “pixel” nature because a pixel can never be a piece of paper.
Perception is the process of attaining awareness and understanding of sensory information the action of taking possession, apprehension with the mind and senses.
” You perceive the world through an automatic filter of affordances. Your perception of a scene is not just the sum of its geometry, spatial relations, light, shadow, and color. Perception streams not just through your eyes, ears, nose, and skin, but is automatically processed through your body mandala to render your perceptions in terms of their affordances.” (p 106 – The Mind has a body of it’s Own – Sandra & Mathew Blakeslee)
Affordances is an idea posed by Psychologist James J. Gibson in his 1977 article “The Theory of Affordances” and explored it more fully in his book The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception in 1979. He defined affordances as all “action possibilities” latent in the environment, objectively measurable and independent of the individual’s ability to recognize them, but always in relation to the actor and therefore dependent on their capabilities.
Affordance is a concept that is widely used to talk about functionality, intent and action with in HCI (Human Computer Interaction), product design, and systems design.When users speak of an object being intuitive, easy to operate, clear and understandable, usually actions have been designed through a clear understanding of the affordance of the actions that are being accomplished.
Take the book for instance, the affordance of pages is sequential ( the english language is read top to bottom, left to right). The language process is a learned, as is the flipping of pages but the affordance of that action is one that is unique to the delivery of the media of language. The variety of this language delivery system is vast and deeply explored through both writing and the design of sequential artifacts. The perception of sequential media is filtered through the affordance of the page and meaning is associated with that artifact through cultural affordance. That is to say that the design of a bible has a particular cultural and meaning space in comparison to a Nancy Drew book while each posses a particular design functionality that is unique to it own content.
Unique to the page is its ability to contain extended meaning through design. The margins of sequential mediums can be signifier to the quality, and value the author has attributed to the ideas on the page. When design is considerate of the content to which it is attempting to communicate, said design can imply particular use scenarios and meaning that can extend and engage the experience of reading.
As technology becomes more and more involved within the delivery of media, the question of the format of delivery and the consideration of the delivery with in the design of the content
Through out the history of language, book, and narrative, the cultural importance of these artifacts has produced
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
Perception is the process of attaining awareness and understanding of sensory information the action of taking possession, apprehension with the mind and senses.