Hasta La Ideas

Our current One Hour Design Challenge, The Future of Digital Reading, closes in just one week. The entries are rolling in, but we want to encourage all of you to take a stab at designing for this emerging cultural phenomenon. To give you some real traction, we’ve teamed up with Portigal Consulting, who have offered up the research generated by their Reading Ahead project as a foundation for your work.

This challenge asks that your project include the sensual; support the social side of reading; consider the varied rituals of reading; and develop an ecosystem around your proposed product. We’ve already cited lunchbreath’s Kindle as a shining example, but here are a few others to get you in the mindset.

Oh, and did we mention this One Hour Design Challenge is actually 90 minutes?

skrbnp2009 has made some nice observations about how sharing books is a part of the culture of reading. In order to encourage this behavior with digital books, the user can “lend” books to others through a bump function, transferring the text for a specific amount of time, and most importantly, requiring the readers to interact physically, just as you would when lending a paper book to a friend. Here, a constraint on digital technology is used in lieu of a material object to encourage the continuation of trading and lending in person, a valuable social interaction that might otherwise be lost.

Cameron maintains that “no device can properly mimic the analog reading experience.” Instead of going completely digital, he seeks to reconcile the benefits of both mediums through the Gutenberg Local/Global Bookmaker, a printing press that takes advantage of the connectivity of the digital realm, while still allowing users to output tangible objects. In this way, books can still be tangibly collected and experienced, but in a way that bypasses limited distribution channels and takes advantage of the digital, open-source model to disseminate and collect information.

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