Craft, quality, longevity, care, sustainable, informative. These words are associated with the experience of well designed books. As a majority of this blog has explored the ideas of design are essential to a experience. Experience is a word that has a wide range of use. It can be broad and specific shallow or deep and short and long. Experience design then has to deal with these binaries at every turn. The video above is an interview with @craigmod at http://www.craigmod.com an great blog and resource for opening the discussion when it comes to the publishing community. I agree with his premise that print material will never go away! and that for existing publishers to compete with digital media they need to reassess the design quality of books. Increasing the craft, quality, and experience which could increase the cost but would establish a different value for the user / readers.
Human beings are very astute creatures and the nuance of quality is probably our greatest skill. The perception of quality is a realm that advertising and design and media has been manipulating for 1000′s of years. Perception of quality is an outcome of communication and commerce. I don’t believe I need to talk about the value of design and quality in an economic system I believe Adam Smith layed it out just fine in wealth of nations. How ever the experience of quality is something that technology has a great impact on. Systems of manufacturing, production and distribution also impact the perception value of an object in society. When Gutenberg was first printing books there the value of such an object was so rare that is had great value this revolution allowed at wave of printing innovation that has made many millionaires and billionaires over through out time. However the advances in manufacturing and production has also degraded the perception of value of print material. Walk through any common book store and the weight of the complicated system that produces books is transparent. The whole system falls away and all that is left is a price tag. It is a huge problem for the perceived value of a book and its experience. This concept occurs in many other place in contemporary society including out modern grocery stores. Business practices of efficiency take the system and infrastructure as unimportant to the experience of an object for sale. However the entire system is the story the context for a book in this case to live in the world. The complication of these system are looked at as too complicated for the simplicity of marketing and advertising of objects. The idea that we only make decisions in the moment. However we know this not to be true! Objects especially well made books become way more interesting when their quality and production are evident on the surface. The most valuable book are those from the gutenberg press. There story and longeivity add to this quality but so does the system that kept their existence going ie libraries. Therefore the quality of a book is the sum of its entire experience. When a book shows up on a shelf is not the beginning of the story is is somewhere in the middle. The story needs to become more evident just as craig mod discusses. Marshall McLuhan once said “we become what we behold …. we shape our tools, and therefore after our tools shape us” for me I hope that that tool is a beautifully design well crafted well written book!
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.
Three types of RFID tags: active RFID tags, which contain a battery and can transmit signals autonomously, passive RFID tags, which have no battery and require an external source to provoke signal transmission and battery assisted passive (BAP) which require an external source to wake up but have significant higher forward link capability providing great read range.
One is an integrated circuit for storing and processing information, modulating and demodulating a radio-frequency (RF) signal, and other specialized functions. The second is an antenna for receiving and transmitting the signal.
RFid have been the technology that has be toted at the wave of the future. A series of chips and printable items that will allow us to walk out of stores and be automatically charged. For as many companies that claim RFid is the wave of the future there are also a number of skeptics and those fearful of the power and versatile technologies.
An exploration of materials that are potentially conductive. A sketch book of process and notes that indicate the use, screen print possibility, cost, and aesthetic quality of the material plus whether or not it can conduct electricity. An on-going exploration into mixing conductive powders and materials with inks, paints and glues that could be used for paint or be pulled through a screen. Initial material choices was dictated by whether or not I thought it might have some conductive aspects. I essentially started with shiny and metallic inks, paints, and glues in the hope that some of them would possess conductive qualities. The process has helped me have a greater understanding of the electric qualities of materials and also the aspects of experimenting to make new hybrid inks.
I have found that powdered graphite will conduct electricity but is a variable resistor so a concentration of powder in ink at the right amounts is essential to making it work. Also I have been debunked by copper and silver powders mixed with gesso or clear base screenprinting ink.
These experiments drive at the idea that designers understand the world through making so my experiments in making conductive ink have given me an understanding of conductive material and its potential use in media especially print media.
Screen printing has been an Art Form and Industry process for many years. Screen printing is extremely useful for artifacts of print nature from posters to t-shirts to business cards. Screen printing as an art form has been used from as far back as Chinese textiles, the Song Dynasty (960–1279 AD).
The process of using a screen to pull ink puts the maker in control of the printed output rather then a machine in form of a digital printer. The physical nature of applying ink has given arts and designers inspiration and a style that can exist outside newly conventional means of digital printing or offset lithography.
The physical affordance of screen printing allows the maker to thinking differently about the process of production. Screen printing has more steps in the production run then just asking a machine to print but also includes a aura of craft, value and specialty that is missing in the digital output. The production process for screen printing invites the idea of multiplicity. Where a digital printer can make just one, screen printing just one would be entirely to much set up and work.
Hybrid Media Systems is an idea that takes the craft and unique nature of printmaking and blends it with technology to give the artifact an experience aspect, mediated by the dynamic affordance of screen based media and enhanced by the uniqueness of artifacts.
