Moving Information

• 2011-04-22

  

  powells:

  Designer Karl Lagerfeld is creating a perfume inspired by “the smell of ink on paper.” True story.

  More here.

  (Thanks to prettybooks for the link.)

  (via wnycradiolab)

  Source: stylecaster.com

• 2010-11-15

  

  Great for a library to display graphic novels with their more descriptive sides out

• 2010-06-01

  This is a great interview with British actor and writer, Stephen Frye. I’ve just begin to discover how entangled he is with the philosophies of living and technology, but this is a great introduction to who he is and what he’s about. 

  In regards to books, he’s enamored with the “young people” who leave books on well traveled paths for future readers to discover. Most of us have probably come across the stray book, dedicated to it’s finder, but a more organized version of this can be found through Book Crossing. At the Crossing, the books are tracked and catalogued. For example, the book A Passage to India, by E.M. Forester has made 130 registered “hops”. That one book/artifact/object/container of content has passed through the lives of at least 500 individuals. Their hands touched the pages, the words graced their life at some appropriate time to absorb the information and let it go to the next traveler. 

  

• 2010-04-11

  Filling out the Problem Space: PaperPaperPaper

  Since I’m addressing the physical aspects of books, it’s time to talk about paper. 

  

  Let us not forget that the familiar musky smell we love, and the gentle tooth of paper comes from trees. 

  Here are some basic facts that I scoured from the Green Press Initiative in their report The State of the Paper Industry. 

  • 42% of the industrial wood harvest is used to make paper
  • If paper is landfilled rather than recycled, it decomposes and produces methane, a greenhouse gas with 23 times the heat-trapping power of carbon dioxide.
  • one-third of municipal solid waste is paper, and municipal landfills account for 34 percent of human related methane emissions to the atmosphere
  • If, for example, the United States cut its office paper use by roughly 10 percent, or 540,000 tons, greenhouse gas emissions would fall by 1.6 million tons. This is the equivalent of taking 280,000 cars off the road for a year.
  • in 2003, only 48.3 percent of office paper was recovered for recycling.

  All good things to keep in mind. However, let’s note that the end use of Books is on the lower end of paper consumption overall. 

  

  But of those books printed, very paperpulp is from recycled fibers. 

  Indicator: Percentage of recycled content in printing and writing paper

  The printing and writing sector accounts for 27% of paper production in the United States, yet less than 6 percent of its fiber comes from recycled sources. More than 90% of the total quantity of printing and writing papers is still made from 100% virgin forest fibers. 

  

  Quick Conclusions

  1. Print on recycled paper. 

  It’s already been proven that recycled paper can be as Bright as virgin pulp, which is a concern of the publishing industry, as they’re manufacturing a product to certain specificities. 

  2.  Print Fewer Books

  With a little research today, I realized that books truly are a commodity. The bookstores request a certain number to fill their inventory, and send back what they don’t need. Those extras go to sit in a warehouse until they need to be shipped out again to fill stock. In the event that those books never sell, they are often shredded onsite and then sent to recycling. 

  > Print On Demand

  > Print Shorter Runs

  Bigger Systemic Conclusions

  So book printing may not be the largest cause of deforestation, but with the strain on the environment and the push to ebooks, it looks like there will be fewer paper books in our future. (Let’s not touch the eco-ness of the ereader. I’ve done LCAs on household products and it ain’t pretty.)

  » What if bookstores were more like libraries?

  We go there to test-drive the content, to see if the pictures are good enough, to see if the price is worth the content.. And then many go home and buy it online through a dealer of used books, or onto their kindle. There’s a lot that can be done with this system, but my first inclination is that stores need to stock less. If they had one copy of each book (like the library?), then customers could browse, enjoy in store, and then get the digital version for home. Just like listening in the record store and then buying the album online. We want the preview. 

• 2010-04-06

  Representational Media

  As an industrial designer I’m probably deluded. I’m under the impression that human beings like to physically interact with objects, tools, and their environments. However, I keep running into digital commentaries that speak otherwise. With the iPad now Officially out, we can conceive of how are media experiences will change. I already stream most of my movies via netflix, and download music from iTunes. But the question is about books. 

  On my flight to Denver I spoke with a woman about her kindle. In her mid fifties, she reads constantly. For both work and pleasure. She really loved the Kindle (DX), keeping 50 ‘books’ on hand at all time. She even recently bought her husband one because he kept stealing hers. You can’t quite lend an eReader. 

  I could sit back and comment on how we’re losing the beauty of the paper page, the musty smell of old books, and the chicken scratch in the margins. But I won’t. It’s probably much more beneficial to think about how things are all about to change with new technology, considering that futurists have little care for my sensory nostalgia. 

  The big shift in my thinking this week has been from BOOK IS OBJECT to BOOK IS MEDIA. Not much distinction, but enough in this sense to relegate the content of a book to the genre of reproducible experience. BOOK/CD/DVD/TAPE/VINYL… All of these mediums are physical, analog to isolate their content to be experienced at-will by the user. If we forget digitalia, there’s no difference between the book on the shelf and the vinyl in the crate. 

  What’s important to note is that we still collect vinyl and beautiful books will never go away. Sure, Malcom Gladwell’s next hit will be digital only, as with every chick lit book on the table at borders, but Edward Tufte - definitely on paper (unless he has new work designed for the digital medium…). 

  Where I’m going with this..

  Representational Media - CD’s, DVD’s contain an experience. They are physical objects whose information/experience can only be accessed through an appropriately designed player. Once it’s in the player, however, the disk is unimportant. What maintains, on your counter, in your bag to send to a friend, is the packaging. 

  This is one of those instances to not take packaging lightly. Industrial designers tend to give it the brush off - “it’s not real product design”, and yes, it gets thrown away immediately after the “out of box experience”. However, the album art, the lyrics folio, the running time and starring information stays around. There’s a duality to the sensory experience. As much as we have tried to isolate media to one sense only, there is still a want for more input. Listening parties centered around the music, and participants passed around the album cover. Mid movie, it’s common to grab the package to figure out “what’s that actor’s name, again?”. It’s why there’s an option for album art on iTunes - though admittedly, it’s not terribly fulfilling. 

  So where does that take us with books? Well, you can probably see where I’m going. Sketches are in progress…

• 2010-04-02

  

  In light of the first few pages of Mauss’ “the gift”, this seemed apt. Digital, intangible gift giving in the 21st century. Nothing like a dancing bear sent straight to you smart phone that says ‘i love you’

• 2010-04-01

  

  Another idea for digital notecards. This one distinctly doesn’t have a “people problem” that it addresses. But this gets it out of my head.

• →

  

  Recordable book concept. Just starting to crank out ideas. hopefully fail sooner, rather than later.

• 2010-03-30

  Yesterday evening, Hiroshi Ishii, director of MITs Tangible Media Group gave a sweet little presentation on the research he’s been doing over the years. Since I finally have a narrow project, I was able to glean specific insights from his talk that relate to that nebulous direction I’m heading. 

  Making a definitive divide between “Tactual” and “Tangible”, Ishii is a proponent of the object in the traditional sense. His piece, “bottlogues” from 2000, is a great example of the tangible object accessing, as he tends to do, an emotional response. The bottles contain music and sounds in an interactive way. I like to think of it as the tech version of an old piece I did, “Contained Cacophony”

  

  What I also love about Ishii’s piece is it’s connection to my favorite book, The Phantom Tollbooth. One character is Dr. Dischord who invents new sounds and bottles them up for sale. I had every intention of linking to a youtube clip of that section of the video.. but alas, the WB had it taken down months ago. 

  Back at the Ranch

  Ishii has done a wonderful thing here. He has linked a sound to an object that does not produce it. It functions much like an instrument when it plays individual noises, but his one example of the perfume bottle for his mother was slightly different. Upon opening, it would let loose the sounds of birds singing in the springtime. The lift of the cap, the function of Opening, accessed not only a sound, but a place, time, and memory. 

  How else can objects be portals to another world?

• →

  Aesthetics and the Senses

  

  My understanding of texts began to unravel last week while reading My Mother Was a Computer. I have begun to see the relationship between the text, the work, and perception, which are all shaped by the medium they’re delivered in. The content (the arrangement of letterforms) remains the same, but is not completely consistent as the reader’s understanding is subject to change based on the translation (to/from any language), personal experience, and medium of access. This dialogue rolls into my new perspectives on the “Reader Function”, seen in support and reference to the “Author Function” (as defined by Foucault). I’ll flesh that one out later. 

  In thinking about the medium of delivery, I went back to an old art school debate. “What is art?” was the subject of many conversations. Of course there was no definition that truly got fleshed out, but there was one thing we could all agree on. Art needs to be sharable. If we back away and see art as “aesthetics”, there are many forms of sharable ideas/concepts/expressions. From 10000 feet (ie. known as a wiki article), we can break down those forms to some general categories: 

  decorative arts  » Craft + Fine Art (2D) + Applied Arts (Graphic Design)

  plastic arts » Sculpture (3D) + Industrial Design (?)

  performing arts » Theatre, Dance, Music, Opera, Circus..

  literature » Novel, Poem, Drama, Short Story

  
  

  Now, I’ll be the first to admit that this general breakdown is by no means accurate. Dividing an aesthetic experience into appropriate categories runs into all sorts of trouble, but for the sake of argument, I’ll let those be (specifically the mess of the first two categories).

  However, even a glance at this list leaves me stumped. In the first three categories, the mediums are implied - metal, wood, air (ie. sound), the body (performance).. but when it comes to literature, the only medium we can glean is paper, paperboard, and (now) code. 

  Performance Art is accessed through visual and auditory cues. Plastic arts (the ones that can be interacted with), can be experienced in terms of their tactual, thermal, and visual cues. But so far, literature is a distinct sensory experience, dominated by the tactual and motor senses, but processed by the primary visual cortex via the retina. 

  I’m in the process of exploring what actually happens ‘in your head’ during the reading experience.. but more than anything, I’ve recognized the sensory divide between the aesthetic experience of Reading and Viewing. It borders on the understanding of Active/Passive relationships, but not quite. There is certainly more labor involved in Reading, which aside from the physical work of page turning, is avoided in the mediums of film and performance. But, then again, it’s that very work that makes reading so exceptional. When we have that aesthetic experience, its our world we dream-see, not the director’s. It plays with perception in a completely different sensorial way.