The Hardcore critique was an opportunity to get some great feedback on my experiments and process, along with an opportunity to gauge what needs to be completed and flushed out before graduation. There were many informative aspects to take away from the review and here are the productive 5.
1.) Prototype! Prototype! Prototype!
The ideas of combining print and screen need to manifest themselves in a way that it is possible to see how a user will engage in such process. Speaking about the ideas is all good an well but unless you can show anyone and engage the opportunity space in a meaningful way it’s just a lot of words.
2.) Focused Scenario
Classroom and product scenario video needs refinement, focusing, and shortening that drives at the ideas that will be shown in the prototype. The prototype comes first and need to complement the opportunity space set up through the video
3.) A New title
Hybrid Media Systems is generic and the title should get at the premise of the experimentation right away. Marginalia seems to hit at the production space so now it is just what the by line and how the supporting language starts to complete itself.
4.) Premise contextualization
I need to get to the idea of print and screen being linked quicker. The premise shouldn’t linger too long on the refuting of physical books but rather dilineate the advantages of combining the affordances of each. Prototype should have examples where actual marginalia was collected but also show how the new form of reading and writing is used, and possible misused. The interface of the prototype should capitalize on the engagement with a classroom and be part of the conversation.
5.) Narrow and Deep
The context and scenario of it existing for a classroom and an educational experience is a rich space but it needs to explored deeper through posing the possibility to teachers and be less about something that can be generalized for all print material.
check out thesis website : Marginalia: The Hybrid Textbook
http://money.cnn.com/2010/02/09/technolog/tablet_ebooks_media.fortune/index.htm
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.
check out thesis website : Marginalia: The Hybrid Textbook
(Resources from Steve Rubel http://www.micropersuasion.com/2008/11/the-coming-end.html)
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.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tangible
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.
check out thesis website : Marginalia: The Hybrid Textbook
Engaging users with an interaction is a difficult process. I am attempting to engage users in natural mapped interactions through iconography the associats a particular action of touch. Natural mapping is a term for the proper and natural arrangements for the relations between controls and their movements to the outcome from such action into the world. Like that of a door knob or a book.The real function of natural mappings is to reduce the need for any information from a user’s memory to perform a task. This term is widely used in the areas of human-computer interaction (HCI) and interactive design discussed in Donald Norman’s book : The design of Everyday Things.
check out thesis website : Marginalia: The Hybrid Textbook
Through out my experimentation with conductive inks and screen printing, I have started to try and engage the user in interaction with the tangible printed artifact. Paper and ephemeral material is inherently tangible and physical you can bend it, tear it, crinkle it, touch it plus it has a texture a quality and a materiality very unique to its form. Unique to the conductive inks is there ability to engage a user. The current experiment is a test to see if certain form structures are inherently engage-able. With out any signage does a user know to touch the paper and interact with the strips. This experiment utilizes the nature the higher contact equals a brighter light.
check out thesis website : Marginalia: The Hybrid Textbook
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
Now the conductive inks that I have made work, I have started to dive into breaking the perception of what a circuit should be and should look like. With the addition of user interaction, turning a light on becomes more interesting and engaging. The earlier experiments are mostly a process of seeing and thinking about paper differently, this is a experiment into giving paper an added interaction through the conductive ink and the simple switches. The form of the conductive lines are skewing the efficiency ideas associated with circuit board design, and the interaction allows the user to piece together the shapes of both the form and of the shape the lights make.
check out thesis website : Marginalia: The Hybrid Textbook
Now that I have gotten an ink that can conduct an current over a relatively decient distance, I have started to play with the notion of what can a circuit look like. Can it be anything you want it to be as long as there is a positive and negative in and out. Can the form start to speak about it functionality, can the forms be unique and artistic rather than function based. Most circuitry disappears and becomes invisible. To most who use electronics and understanding of the work, skill, craft, and planning that has gone into a majority of the things they operate on a daily basis is pretty minimal. Electronics work and we rarely pay attention until they stop working. An interest in involving conductive ink is to challenge the expectation and visibility of otherwise invisible things. The mixed media piece of conductive ink, copper tape on paper is an experiment into changing and evaluating the expectations of electronic conductivity and use.
check out thesis website : Marginalia: The Hybrid Textbook