Anne Balsamo - Onomy Labs - X-periments in the Future of Reading
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Used to be part of Xerox Parc's Research in documents
XFR Charter
New Media Genres - "Genres are ways in which information design gets codified over time and over distance"; consists of authoring tools, design lang, material forms, social arrangements
genre - a set of conventions for meaning construction
New Document Forms - emerging tech; xerox's core technology, information design of new media (conventions and requirements of new media technologies, paper conventions (i.e. PDF) not suitable for general web consumption (there is a nielsen alertbox about this)); archiving/exchange/documentation/encoding
Innovative Research Methods - designing experiments, not products; speculative design (markets don't necessarily exist, products we don't yet need or imagine that we want); worked in studio culture; high-visibility, high-risk project
Museum as Genres
XFR gets ready to hit the tech museum!
What is cultural meaning of museums?
- turn of century: collections of artifacts
- 1960s science centers: Hands-on demonstrations
- 1980s: focus on participatory interactive exhibits; exploratorium
The intended recipient: example of applied genre research/design
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visitor - term of museum intended recipient; different from user (expectation of repeated use), audience (expectation of non-participation)
- visitor expectations
- preferred mode of engagement: having it be really simple for someone to learn things; "big brass knob" tradition of science museum exhibits: that there is basically one variable you can tweak in a predigested experience. different from, say, art event where what you get out of it is largely dependent on what you put into it
- attention span: success failure means ppl get really into exhibit, big line forms, everyone goes away, and stuff doesn't get seen; if person can't get into experiment very quickly, they can very easily just walk away
- accessibility: colorblind, able-bodied, small children, other languages, ppl in wheelchairs
Part of the exhibit was a Book Artist's Studio where a book artist was working all the time. Aimed to ground future of reading in the practice of document production today. Who are the people behind documents?
What do the experiments look like?
Honor tradition of paper based books. Don't completely abandon them. At the time, people were all up-in-arms about PDAs. But Scott points out that even if these technologies are successful, they don't completely replace the old. So don't get caught up in ooh the pda.
Where will tech take the narrative?
