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 line needs to be drawn in the sand for the values of static media. The expectation and belief that that dynamic content is the wave of the future needs to be reconsidered. Motion pictures are great incredible informative and interesting and have changed the way we see and respond to the world, but do we want every bit of content the we engage with to be moving or worse reactive. Media content has variety and in my opinion more value should be placed on the ability of somethings to be still and other things to move.
The expectation that readers of Outside will want to want motion images assumes that the current model of photography is incomplete to the user and what is the answer, a screen. A world of screens is not one that I hope will exist.
As technologies become more and more pervasive, print media companies are starting to jump on the bandwagon that a screen is a “better” way to experience their content. With the techno world buzzing about the possibilities of tablet computers from Apple, Microsoft, and prototype Joojoo
, media providers rather then improving or increasing content awareness are opting for the screen. The demo of the Sports Illustrated magazine on a tablet is a interesting view into the possibilities of their future content. Complete with page turning sounds and multi-touch options the demo shows some potential in eliminating the magazine. I mean why would I buy print when I can get it on a screen? Soon enough we will never have old used magazines that can be rummaged through at our uncles “the sport nuts” house.
The introduction of the iPhone has truely had immense impact on the acceptance of interacting with the screen. I just see the thinking of “You know what is better than an iPhone, A bigger iPhone!” faulty. The iPhone functionality and pervasiveness is seen in the Joojoo demo utilizing similar learned interactions from the existing phone. Technology is iterative and for innovation to exist predecessors have to come before, I am having a hard time coping with the innovation of phones replacing the innovations that print has made since the invention of the printing press.
The experience of print material on a screen starts to include video options and some level of costume interactions which is what makes interaction with screen objects effective and engaging but is that functionality worth the tangible interaction with printed paper. Interactions with the tablet are all learned and idiosyncratic rather than the free form and intuitive interactions with the pages of a magazine. The ease of getting to page 22 in a magazine is much different than the action to do that same thing on a tablet. Especially a magazine like SI where a users is less inclined to read from front to back (unless we are talking about the swim suit issue of course) Regardless the SI interactive has some interesting potential but in my opinion will never become a replacement for the greatest bathroom reading since the Victoria Secret Catalog (unless it can become waterproof.) I just don’t see a tablet computer replacing the magazine rack in the bathroom no matter how interactive and engaging it is.
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
Perception is the process of attaining awareness and understanding of sensory information the action of taking possession, apprehension with the mind and senses.