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…
