New Book

Mori, Keiko

Our writing activity has now shifted from paper to a computer screen due to the flexibility in editing the technology offers to us, such as cut and paste and duplication of the same file. This man-computer cooperation works really well in the case of writing. How about reading? In the long history, we have not seen any big shift in our reading activity yet, and it has not moved from printed medium. Is it because of the texture, smell, size, or action of flipping pages that we get from books? How can we apply new media to our reading activity in a way that the man-computer cooperation exists well?

I started this project with focusing on what new media can offer to help our reading activity. The concept for my newBook is that both my newBook and the reader provide information to each other. I started analyzing my reading activity and realized that I often make links within content in order to understand and organize it in my head. I took this idea of linking and applied it to my newBook. This is where customization comes in. The reader can create links, attach notes to them and revisit them later. Here, a table of contents works as a visual map which indicates the links and bookmarks the user has created in the past.

Then I set my audience to be researchers. When we do a research, we get information from multiple books and create links between materials from them. This is where my project shifted from newBook to newDesk. The idea was to have a desk whose whole top surface is a screen where you can work on. The challenge here was to include the advantage of virtual space and that of real space. The user can save links and groups of books, search links and books from the huge database. Also, the user should be able to do what he/she can do on a real desk, such as moving things around freely on the space.