Experience Design

http://phillipian.net/article/8535

As technology become more and more ubiquitous, instances of technological over hauls should not be a process that should shock and awe. There has not been a revolt from the users of land line telephone into cell phones, or slide ruler calculator users to digital calculators, but still when I hear about the replacement of libraries with digital e-readers it makes me cringe. I want to stand up and revolt. The notion that a digital e-reader can replace the library in my opinion is in accurate. After hearing a story on NPR about schools and universities decisions to replace their libraries with internet cafe’s and Kindles made me very sad for the quality of learning. Technology has the ability to make incredible advances in knowledge space and context but to say that a networked screen is a more effective alternative to quantifiable, tangible, and accessible knowledge contained in a library is completely wrong. The internet is not a big library and a library is not the internet. They work and operate at different levels.

The affordance of a library is one that has impacted knowledge gathering for centuries and is something that intrinsically contained with in a architectural space. An e-reader has the infinite space of the internet where connected can be adhock and the quality of the linked material is maintained souly by a computer algorithm. Since a library utilizes space, the ability to reference books to the left right and behind a particular search allows for much more access to serendipitous connections where as on the internet and networked experience the knowledge is only as good as the question poised to the search engine. The spacial and tangible nature of books is the aspect that I think is completely ignored by the universities, schools, and institutes that think printed knowledge is on its way out. A kindle is not a table in a library nor it is a shelf with spacial hierarchy it is data Zeros and Ones transmitted over wireless signals.

While doing research I may have to opportunity at a library to have multiple sources on a table at once and have the opportunity to make connections between content purely due to the spacial juxtaposition. Try and accomplish this on a kindle or a web browser or wikipedia and the limitations will astonish the user.

I believe the movement to contain library data with in a e-reader illuminates the spacial aspect of learning and reference material. The idea that the e-reader and the library are in opposition is in my opinion faulty thinking and fails to consider the unique affordances of library use and of e-reader use.  The two are not equal and therefore should not be the replacement for the other.

check out thesis website : Marginalia: The Hybrid Textbook

As I research and explore the ideas of conductive circuitry that could start to engage print media as a platform for interactive based computational experiences, I have started to explore the ideas of interactivity and affordance.

Interaction is based on the assumption that a user understands the applied action to accomplish a task. Something as simple as turning a light on can be made incredible complex by not hinting at learned and understood experiences. In Donald Norman’s book – “the design of everyday things” http://www.jnd.org/ he talks at length about the importance of visible interfaces and interaction parts know as natural mapping which comes from proper and natural arrangements for the relations between controls and their movements to the outcome from such action into the world. The real function of natural mapping is to reduce the need for any information from a user’s memory to perform a task. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_mapping) Essentially when a user participates in a task that action is the out come of a plethora of learned, cultural and socio-economic process that have been ingrained into the users understanding.  The idea of natural mapping techniques allow things to be perceived as being intuitive. Objects that need no prior instruction. With contemporary electronics the cultural and social economic inundation of computation has started to become learned and performed by cultures at an extremely high rate and at younger and younger ages. The importance of this technology revolution is that artifacts like the cell phone etc have started to be perceived as naturally mapped artifacts with interactions not that unfamiliar to a user than the interaction of a door or a tea kettle.

The question is are the interactions that we engage with our computational electronics the right interactions? Can we engage naturally mapped ideas from culture to engage new and innovative products that rather than force the user learn a new system, are engaged to the perceived natural mapped system?

check out thesis website : Marginalia: The Hybrid Textbook