Dominic Basulto blogged about how you could put emotional value on digital objects and somehow talks about digital patina, which—being the subject of my bachelor’s thesis—is something I find very, very interesting:
How can Tablet users replicate these types of “statements”? One idea that a colleague mentioned to me involved the notion of “dynamic weathering” of applications — the more that you use an app, the more that it would appear “weathered” and used. People would know how often you were reading by how “worn” your iPad’s screen looked, for example.
I think this is the closest we come right now in the physical space:
He moves on a bit and talks about the “books as objects for conversation”:
Finally, there’s the whole idea of using books as a conversation starter. The classic example, of course, is the young man on the subway who catches the eye of a beautiful young girl and decides to initiate the courtship ritual through a casual, “Oh, I love that book, too.”
Today, the only possibility would be for the guy to lean over the girl and read what was on her screen, thus somehow invading her private sphere. How can we design our way around that? Would you have a LED-display on the backside of your iPad telling the other passengers what you were reading?
It’s interesting how a lot of emotion gets lost in purely digital interaction, and how we could apply some “wearability” to the design to represent the patination as a result of extended use. How this could be done is something I think about every single day but haven’t found the answer to yet.
James Bridle also wrote a lovely post on the emotion-less eBooks as well, but in October 2010:
The problem here is that these are all arguments about the physical book: about its physicality. And while traditional books are physical objects, that’s not the core of our relationship with them. The truth is that books are essentially not physical objects, but temporal ones.
So the real problem with the ebook as it stands is that it denies us many of these temporal aspects, which produces a kind of cognitive dissonance. And there’s a social layer that forms around this, another timeline of reading reviews and discussing with friends, that the ebook could actually exploit better than the physical book, if we work on it some more. We really need to look at how we address this temporal mode with ebooks.
He’s wonderfully optimistic about the potential in eBooks seeing they don’t have the ability as being something you display on your shelves, but something you enjoy with your friends and strangers alike while you read it.
#books #digital patina #ipad #tablet
