analogue

E-reading, memory and design

There is an interesting connection between ebooks and memory. There are comments on this in many places (Scholarly Kitchen, Time, Scientific American) but Verlyn Klinkenborg sums it up nicely:

I finish reading a book on my iPad — one by Ed McBain, for instance — and I shelve it in the cloud. It vanishes from my “device” and from my consciousness too. It’s very odd.

This is familiar to those who read ebooks but it is really not that strange. Despite being different contents the ebook text lacks dimensions and differences that help our memories. Books have different covers, fonts, layouts, graphical elements, paper quality and more. They are marked by use: Old books are creased and sometimes stained. There may be a coffee stain on a page in your favorite book that will evoke a memory of the reader spilling coffee while reading. While attempting to find a passage in a paper book we can remember how far in the book the text appeared, that it was on the left or right and whether it was at the top of the page or not.

Caught Reading by Jayel Aheram CC BY

These dimensions are not available in ebooks. Most readers have only one font. Layouts barely vary, and if you have a stain on the screen, it appear on every page. All the ebooks weigh the same, look the same and smell the same. Only the text (not the font) varies. Because of this we struggle to remember texts we read in ebooks and this also effects our ability to understand new texts.

While I recognize the issue when it comes to ebooks. Does it really have the same effect with other e-reading? Many of us spend most of our days reading of screens. Blogs, emails and Wikipedia. Not to mention all the time we spend on online news and reading/re-reading our own writing. Are these more or less forgetful, compared with their physical counterparts? Or does the geography and variation of the web enable us to remember these more.

Is it not e-reading in general that makes us forget, but rather the poor design & format of the medium that hinders our memory? It could be that the screen based format is not the optimal for longer continuous texts.

Posted on by Mathias Klang

Paper vs Digital Books infographic

Paper books are nothing more than the corpses of dead trees and other cool one-liners abound. But why do people chose to prefer one version over another?

Fatbrain asked around and created this infographic.

What are the top reasons for choosing a real life, lo-fi, analogue, hardcopy book over the digital option? In a recent poll we asked 1,000 Fatbrainers just that. Here’s what they told us.

books_infographic

Posted on by Mathias Klang

What is good design for you?

In praise of analogue technologies

All of us are immersed in technologies but when we speak of technology we inevitably jump to the digital varieties. This is unsurprising as these are the new, new things of the day. It’s also unsurprising as we have been taught to be enthralled by shiny technology due to the ways in which Apple has designed and marketed their products.

In addition to this my own views of design and desire is warped by my workplace and research interests. This results in the creating of the idea that design must, almost exclusively, deal with digital technology.

But there is something very limiting in this worldview and I would like to get a better perception of the design of everyday things. One way to go is to read the design books – and I can highly recommend this approach – why not read, for example, Don Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things.

But I want to go another way and explore design through the things that surround us. We are in a period of design fetishism where good must be expensive and then gets priced that way. So price is involved but I would like to go beyond the dominance of price in looking for, and at, design.

So what I would like is to collect examples of good design with a motivation as to why it is good design. I am not looking for consensus but for stories. So to kick it off I would like to give some examples of good analogue design.

The Barcelona chair – this is a visual object that changes the room in which it is set. It pleases me to sit in it even if other chairs would do the job equally well. It’s affect on me is entwined with my ideas of the chair as well as the object itself.

Good kitchen knives. The balance of a “real” kitchen knife is extremely tactile. It fits and becomes an extension of the hand that uses it. Equally a bad knife makes cooking a chore.

The Merkur razor. At some point I got tired of being owned by Gillette and bought a real old razor with real old razor blades. It’s heavy and does not fit in the hand like the kitchen knife but because of its weight and the risk of cuts turns a boring everyday task into a meditative act. Sure, I may bleed a bit more but the morning ritual is totally different today.

So please let me know, what are your examples of good design?

Posted on by mklang