It may come as a surprise to many but the idea of adding daily value to a digital object is a relatively untrodden landscape. Some would say its the beginning of the end for the newspaper, however this day has been long coming. Now don’t get me wrong, I like the physical newspaper it has an experience that is uniquely its own which I believe is a reason it has both dissipated and stayed beloved by many. The ritual of the morning paper sufficed generations of engaged and interested citizenry, but the fact of the matter is that ritual is no longer. A causality of a mediated and techno social world. However the content that exists on the pages of newspapers, some would say dieing media, is still relevant. I would argue more relevant then ever because the access of citizen journalism and the 24 hour news cycle has severely watered down the quality of content. Therefore the success of the “The daily” iPad app, which in my opinion took them way too long to launch, will rest on the quality of the content and subsequently the advertising.
In the feature laden demo, an emphasis is placed on the interactions with the content. The swipe, the carousel, the saving and sharing of content. However not one attribute or hint to how advertising infiltrates the content or coincides with the content is shown? Plus what kind of information will the daily know about their subscribers (With facebook connect they can know a whole lot) I believe the content is priced very reasonable. Low enough to make it worth a lark but also an amount that makes me wonder how Murdock is making ends meet? Since there was no inclination to the severity of advertising within the content then it is safe to presume that individualized use data is what he is hoping to mine! Similar to Facebook personalization of advertising is accessed through the tracking of users. What better way to track users then by giving them an app to read the news from every day. Now I am probably over reacting but it would be nice to know what kind of information “the daily” keeps track of? But this is the trade off for cheap content, right? Something has to give. Now I have no proof of this hypothesis but it is a logical explanation unless “the daily” is strangely populated with ads which very well could be the fact. Either way these new technologies allow for a much different level of interaction between content provider and company. The newspaper model was relatively simple before, deliver a paper into people’s hands and charge advertisers for that access. Similar is the iPad but now an advertiser can have proof of that delivery rather than a guess like that of a newspaper subscription. Now the burden of access is left to the trackers of that unique fact.
User Experience design has been a contested title for those designers who already think they accomplish these tasks as graphic designer / art directors. User experience is a title that is vague on purpose. What is the roll of a designer in a system or product. For 100′s of years designers have taken visual language and communication skill and applied them to the purposes of commerce and business. Graphic design is the use of art to sell. How ever in an ever changing technological world the ideas of usability and engagement have confronted the business world and created a void for which graphic designers need to fill. For some industries like the music industry there unwillingness to adapt to the changing music experience allowed other companies more versed in the experience of new technologies to take the legs from their business models, ie apple. User experience is vague for the reason that it can encompass so many facets of the business cycle from strategy of a product launch to the specific of how a user logs in. The spectrum of experience is the importance of the role of a UX designer not just the specific of a swatch color. Tweet
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!
A Norwegian researcher, Anne Mangen, wrote an interesting paper in the Journal of Research in Reading, asserting that screen reading and page reading are radically different. “The feeling of literally being in touch with the text is lost when your actions – clicking with the mouse, pointing on touch screens, or scrolling with keys or on touch pads – take place at a distance from the digital text, which is, somehow, somewhere inside the computer, the e-book, or the mobile phone,’’ Mangen writes.
Her conclusion: “Materiality matters. . . . One main effect of the intangibility of the digital text is that of making us read in a shallower, less focused way.’’
The materiality of paper takes on a extended meaning due to its experience. The knowledge that is contained with in a book is not singularly wrapped up in the words on the page. From psychology class in college at Colorado State University, I remember my teacher telling us that our brains formulate knowledge and recall through repeating similar experiences under which that knowledge was learned. For example if you are juiced up on coffee while you study for a test you should be juiced up on coffee during the test because the brain associates the experience of the learning along with the recall of that information. Similarly you might be able to recall a story in a book more vividly when the same circumstances are repeated. The engagement of content influences our learning and subsequent recall. Therefore the reading of a book is learned through the experience of the pages. Knowledge that is engaged in the physicality of pages is then linked with that experience. Pages then become essential to formulation of knowledge within a book.
Media critic William Powers wrote a defense of physical bound literature in his essay, “Hamlet’s BlackBerry: Why Paper Is Eternal,’’ Mr. Paper – he not dead, Powers wrote: “There are cognitive, cultural, and social dimensions to the human-paper dynamic that come into play every time any kind of paper, from a tiny Post-It note to a groaning Sunday newspaper, is used to convey, retrieve, or store information.’’
Paper will never die, Powers concluded: “It becomes a still point, an anchor for the consciousness. It’s a trick the digital medium hasn’t mastered – not yet.’’
The digital medium has been attempting to replace the piece of paper and it has been around the corner in terms of technology since technology began. Now what if the digital medium and the physical medium where equal? When paper and computer work together seamlessly then paper takes on an added functionality with the computer.
The digital textbook?
With students doing so much of their reading assignments through the screen instead of on book or paper formats, it’s important for educators to determine how the shift is altering their habits and learning. The research is just beginning, but it’s getting deeper, an article in the Journal of Research in Reading (2008, pp. 404-419) by Anne Mangen, “Hypertext fiction reading: haptics and immersion.” Mangen notes the growing sub-field of screen reading studies, but finds that the “intangibility and volatility of the digital text” remain under-examined. She focuses first, then, on the material nature of digital and non-digital reading experiences. “Unlike print texts,” she writes, “digital texts are ontologically intangible and detached from the physical and mechanical dimension of their material support, namely, their computer or e-book (or other devices, such as the PDA, the iPod or the mobile phone” (405).
This is important, she argues, because “materiality matters.” The reading experience includes manual activities and haptic perceptions (what the skin and muscles and joints register), and so as activities and perceptions of that kind are changed from one kind of reading experience to another because of the object, the reading experience, too, will change.
So if materiality matters in the delivery of content especially reading material, then it would be arguable that to remove the materiality of paper from the reading experience would fundamentally alter that exchange. Screen engagement has become a reality in modern times but the advantages of the screen have forced its usability right next to the book forcing them to go head to head. I have chosen to regard these experience as different and explore a way to bridge the difference between experiences. As use of screen based devices increases, the need for physical interaction with objects like books will become essential in the recombination of content delivery. I believe users should not have to exchange one experience for the other in order to engage in the content the way they would like. Many things in this world have multiple experiences and with the linking physical and digital is opens up a strategy and platform for making printed content and digital content work together.
John Locke said, “reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.” Thinking can be greatly enhanced through digital means of networking so making paper and computer work together will greatly enhance the opportunity to make reading our again.
The Fortune Article ” the Future of Reading” poses some relevant questions?
Question 1: Will anyone be willing to pay for content delivered to a tablet when they can get information for free on the web?
Question 2: But aren’t tablets just a better way to browse the web?
Question 3: Reading? Reading is dead.
Question 4: How will tablet-based ads work better than the web?
Question 5: Can traditional publishing companies reorganize and move fast enough to embrace and serve new platforms?
these questions all poise the options as if the book and the screen are binary. Print media is looked as a being obsolete due to the advancement of screen based tablets. Granted the pervasive nature of digitized content will have a large impact on printed materials. This effect has already stated to take its toll when it comes to newspaper media. How ever like Red heads in America, their kind is not going to dissappear. Book and printed material might start to diminish but then is begs the question just as the question poised above, what is a book when it can exist on a screen?
This question requires going back to the nuanced history of printed material in bound and sequenced form and taking note of its ability to become ubiquitous and why? The screen and the book will never be the same thing as one is fundamentally material based ie pages and ink while the other is silicon driven ie the screen. Each of these forms is a media delivery device and technology. (Although many might not consider books a technology when compared to a computer) Each media format has its own place, use factors, acceptance, penetration into society, and distribution. Each is equally unique to its time and space and each is locked in a continuum that links the two in weave of consumerism, knowledge, and social contextuality. The screen experience would not be capable without the book, and the book would not be producible in contemporary terms with out a computer.
I have asked my self through out this process, why do we consider physical books and digital book and being so different. Why when you buy a physical book do you not receive the digital part also? It seems to me that if you could link the physical with the digital it would allow each of there forms strenghts and affordances to work together rather then in opposition. The simplicity of sequential pages bound together has a unique experience that can only be mimicked by the screen and the social and networking capabilities of a screen require the dynamics of that different system. What are the implications of making print and screen work together, well hopefully it will lead to more productive use of materials and a platform for a larger connection of information directed at specific context.
Isaac Asimov in 1988 spoke with Bill Moyer and starts to discuss the importance of learning and the power the internet and networked computers can have on the ability to impact learning. At 1:23 sec of the conversation video from youtube.com.
“through this machine, for the first time we can have a one to one relationship between information source and information consumer.” – Issac Asimov
This ability opens up the curious mind to explore its own path and suggests that the separation between knowledge and consumption is null. Learning becomes less about the hoops that are jumped through and more about the enjoying of discovering truths on an individual achievement. The machine (computer) and its networking ability has fundamentally challenged the pedagogical structure. Therefore is education really just they ability to engage enticement? a place where you learn to be curious? Or can it continue to establish the carrot and stick mentality of achievement via grades?
If the computer opens up a one to one relationship, what is the responsibility of the objects and services that provide that communication space? the idea that questions lead not to answers but a path of inquiry. A location space to which an individual can challenge a system and explore the possibilities. Is the level of conversation then the metric for which to judge success? The ability to broadcast and engage inquiry and learning beyond the carrot and stick look at my grades, my merits, my achievements but rather look at my connections, my influence, my conversations. Knowledge is contained in groups, societies, and social structures and ways at which to engage communication about knowledge could become the new metric for advancement, innovation or achievement.
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.
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.
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.
An Interactive poster using conductive ink with a five color print (edition of 12) serigraphed artifact. Functionality of poster is activated through the user touching the conductive ink switches on the poster which both activate a LED light and a canon sound. Image inspired by a CocoRosie song.
