People centric practice implies not just a human centred approach, but one which encompasses the whole context in which we live and work, and impacts on other creatures and lifeforms that are part of such environments – the more-than-human world. It addresses the whole ecologies of which we are part, on upon which we depend for our very existence. People does not have to mean exclusively human – we might consider other species (trees, birds, mammals etc) as peoples, as some indigenous humans have done, since they constitute their own societies and ways of being in the world. All have as much right to life as each other, it is only human hubris which champions our right to own and exploit everything else as paramount.

The booklet brings together, in a simple way, a set of principles and guides for working based on empathy, common sense, trust and agency. It is centred on establishing and following an ethos – through listening and responding, trusting and being trusted; anticipating consequences and reflecting on what you do. It adds into the mix principles for building trust borrowed from Baroness Onora O’Neill’s 2002 Reith Lectures, as well as the Precautionary Principle, Duty of Care and the Nolan Principles of Public Life. It also includes personal values: passion, intensity, intimacy, pleasure, obligation, responsibility, culpability.

Download on bookleteer, or read the online version.

The UnBias Fairness Toolkit is now available and free to download – you can read all about it in the Handbook below:

We devised simple workflows, diagrams and ‘thinksheets’ as well as developing some workbooks and notebooks that individuals could use – all made with bookleteer. We printed up a batch of each using the Short Run printing service, but a key part of the design was that anyone could easily download, print out and make up more copies if they needed to, or the centre could easily order more printed copies as and when they had funding.

We are now creating generic versions of all these tools so that anyone else can set up their own version of a Neighbourhood Ideas Exchange (NIE), can download and make up the notebooks and other tools. We’ve completed versions of the existing 4 notebooks – Experiences, Managing a Problem, Communicating a solution online, Things To Do – and are writing a general guide to the toolkit and NIE concept.

We’ve also been condensing our experiences working in Pallion, as well as many years experience working with other communities both here and abroad, into a playful set of StoryCubes designed to help communities, facilitators and organisers think through the different kinds of steps needed for something like a neighbourhood ideas exchange or other community network. We’re hoping to have the whole toolkit finished in time for the AHRC Connected Communities Showcase on 12th March, where we’ll be showing materials created for our other collaboration with ISG on the Hidden Families project.

We think this is a great way of showing how easy it is for individuals or groups to create and print multiple books in short runs (such as 50 copies) that can be collected together to make a beautiful publication. We will be aiming to add the ability to design and print out your own slipcases to bookleteer later this year, but in the meantime we’re happy to discuss designing and printing custom slipcases for your projects.

To help CCI widen the audience for their work we’ve posted 7 eBooks on our diffusion.org.uk library and will be making others available there as they are created. All are welcome to download and share eBooks from the Library of Traces.

Going away this summer?? It’s a great feeling, once you’ve booked that holiday and start counting down the weeks to a get-a-way, somewhere beautiful, adventurous or even laid-back and relaxing.

Exploring the craziness of New York’s Time Square, the hustle and bustle of Abu Dhabi’s Souks, the calmness of Maldives serene beaches, the list goes on…

Coming back with all those memories and stories that you can’t wait to tell everybody! The only problem I have is remembering the name of that fantastic coffee shop I went to, or that busy vibrant market where I got my dazzling shawls from or even the restaurant where I tasted the delicious local food. So if someone asked me to recommend places to go and see or where to eat, sure I could get their mouth watering describing the succulent chicken and thirst quenching cocktails, but I couldn’t actually tell them the names of these places… because I had forgotten!

I’m always in need for a scrap piece of paper to jot things down. Having a book that can easily fit into a pocket or a handbag would be most ideal. Creating a book on Bookleteer gives me this exact opportunity, to easily print and assemble and take with me.

It’s also useful to jot down other little things you come across on holiday such as the local language. Maybe how to say ‘hello’ in Mandarin or ‘thank you’ in Greek.

Have a look at the mock up book I made, to give you an idea of what can be done…

A handy book that can easily fit into your back pocket or your handbag and taken with you everywhere on your holiday! Now you don’t have to struggle to remember everywhere you went, just scribble it down in your own Bookleteer book!

]]> https://bookleteer.com/blog/2010/10/some-recent-ppod-books/ https://bookleteer.com/blog/2010/10/some-recent-ppod-books/#comments Fri, 08 Oct 2010 16:32:23 +0000 http://bookleteer.com/blog/?p=2766 September was a busy month here at Proboscis and on bookleteer: we sent seven books to be printed via the PPOD service as well as 10 different StoryCubes. The range of publications was very broad, from books about exhibitions and art projects to a book in Arabic about a major archaeological excavation in Sudan and a special notebook for a symposium on digital engagement and another full of QR codes. The StoryCubes included an 8 cube ‘cube of cubes’ set by artists Joyce Majiski and Alice Angus on their Topographies & Tales project, a promotional cube about bookleteer itself and a cube by artist Melissa Bliss to promote her installation, Bird Song, at the b-side media festival in the Isle of Portland.

The photo above shows the various StoryCube and printed eBooks :

Proboscis have been invited to make a film that will be presented as part of a Leonardo/MIT mobile digital exhibition curated by Jeremy Hight. The film will provide an abstracted overview of Proboscis’ themes and projects over the past few years and will be made and illustrated by Alice. However, the process of making the film was begun by Mandy who drew up the storyboard which has now been converted into the Tangled Threads eBook.

Mandy’s starting point was a piece of text I wrote which aimed to invoke the imagery and metaphors often used by Proboscis to describe their projects. The text also provided points for jumping into more detailed overview of Proboscis’ work from the past few years. Mandy took this text and transformed it into an intricate and beautiful mix of words and illustrations.

Storyboard panel sketches for Tangled Threads

Mandy moved quickly to produce her initial sketches, discarding ideas and developing a single artistic strand. After creating the storyboard panels you can see above she worked on individual frames drawing them up in detail before digitally painted the images to produce a full-colour illustrated eBook.

At the back of the eBook are a number of illustrations for you to cut out and stick them into the allocated spaces throughout the pages. Instructions for doing this are provided on pages 1 and 2. Making Tangled Threads the very first pop-up eBook!

And this is the result..

Download the eBook and make it up for yourself on diffusion.org.uk and read more about Mandy’s storyboarding process on the Proboscis blog here..

As I wrote last week, I have been co-organising the Inspiring Digital Engagement Festival in Sheffield and I wanted to make an eBook for it to try to capture participants feelings and views around digital technologies, digital inclusion, engagement and the festival itself. Thanks to Giles, these eBooks were printed through bookleteer’s PPOD service and ready for me to take to Sheffield on Tuesday.

The eBook was imaginatively titled ‘Inspiring Digital Engagement Festival‘ and consisted of 14 pages with the first page being an introduction and the last page providing space for comments and observations. Pages 3 and 4 were a double-page showing the programme for the day and this was so useful! It helped people anticipate the order in which things would happen and figure out who they were listening to at that moment.

The rest of the eBook was filled with a selection of open-ended questions. Questions included ‘How do you spend your time?‘, ‘Who owns digital space? What are the limitations, restrictions or edges?‘ and ‘What unexpected pleasures did today bring?‘ If you’re a member of bookleteer you can download the eBook here if you’re interested in seeing all of the questions we used.. (If you’re not a member you can sign up here!)

Example of a page from the IDEF eBook

The eBooks were handed out as people arrived at the event – you can see them on our registration ‘desk’ in the photo above… We had designed a selection of micro-activities to take place throughout the day which would have led people into filling in the eBooks individually and collaboratively. Of course, we ran late and some of these activities were cut, however, in the closing minutes of the festival we asked people to turn to their neighbour and to fill in their eBook together.

While the eBooks seemed too seductive for people to want to give them back to us the few that we have show such thoughtful answers and leading questions that I would love to see the rest and I feel that using the eBook for reflection and evaluation was successful and certainly something I would use again – though hopefully with more time to give to it throughout the event.

CCI uses the eBook in all sorts of ways with all sorts of people. You can find a number of examples of their designs as part of their Recent Publications on their website. The following is a brief outline of some of the work she is currently doing with the eBook.

Sample project: Trail of Imagination and Curiosity

One example of how CCI has used the eBooks is the project titled Trail of Imagination and Curiosity that took in the spring of 2009 in Mill Road Cemetery, Cambridge.

CCI was commissioned by the Cambridge Folk Museum to explore how the people living and working around the Mill Road Cemetery, particularly the families of children attending St Matthew’s Primary School, Brunswick Nursery and ACE Nursery, could find ways to engage with the space in a more meaningful way.

The project was initially developed using the metaphor of a “trail”. The eBook was redesigned to function as a sort of scrapbook of ideas to help visitors to play in the cemetery and to provide potential visitors with traces of how others had used the site. Two creative facilitators who worked with CCI, Deb Wilenski and Filipa Pereira-Stubbs, organised a series of workshops in the Cemetery with different family groups linked to the local organisations. CCI brought the families in and played with them, listened to their stories about the area and tried to notice how they engaged with the space. This part of the project was reflected in a design by Susanne Jasilek along the top of the eBook available for download. The other half of the eBook was designed so that families who would also like to use the eBook as a part of their visit to the cemetery and trace their own play and discoveries. The key objective of the project as defined by Ruth was to provide the families with a way to begin to find their own way through the cemetery.

For Ruth, this project was a great example of how to gather and publish information as part of CCI’s activities while avoiding dull and formulaic resources such as A4 worksheets. The eBooks could easily be made available as a free, downloadable resource for the potential visitors.

One thing that Ruth would have liked to do with this project, had there been more resources available, was to find a way for families who use the eBooks to exchange their ideas and work with the eBooks over the website, to maintain a dialogue between the families.

Why the eBook?

Ruth’s first encounter with the eBooks was on the Diffusion website where she had a look at a number of Proboscis’ projects. Although she had tinkered around with the material online, she felt the only way she could determine whether or not these tools would be useful as part of her work was to attend one of the free Pitch-up-and-Publish sessions in Proboscis’ studio in London in the autumn of 2009. Although she didn’t know most of the people attending, she was able to get fairly familiar with the eBooks thanks to the presentations there.

Ruth was initially interested in finding new ways of documenting ideas and events within CCI’s workshops so as to make them visible to the participants in the workshops so that they could see the value in what they had done even after the workshop was over:

“If what you value is the process, how do you make that visible? […] It’s a way of trying to make learning visible and special: through our eyes, but using their voices and as much as possible”

CCI now uses the eBooks and StoryCubes as a way to record what goes on in every session they run. They then offer this documentation back to the participants after the session. Ruth attributes part of CCI’s success in using the eBook as part of their workshops it being an open-ended and low-tech tool rather than something more “threatening”. She explains:

“It’s not big. You know, you can write two or three things, or some people wrote essays. Some people wrote just one word. It feels that you can come at it any way that you want to […] It had a scope for people to respond to it in a way that they liked.”

Challenges, recommendations and suggestions

One of the resources that Ruth feels makes the eBooks particularly easy to use are the videos available online such as “How to make: Book Portrait Diffusion eBook”. CCI now provides a link to this video whenever they post one of their eBooks. This is a great resource for people who are unfamiliar with how to make the eBooks from scratch. Ruth also recommends using a bone folder for making the books.

After examining my own eBook, the eBookObserver, she cautioned me against using the sketchbook format if I was planning to use it without a flat surface to write on because in such cases, you rarely end-up using both sides of the pages.

Some of the artists she has worked with have also wondered whether it would be possible to generate an online eBook template that would enable the person printing out the eBook to choose the order of the pages before printing.

A few days ago we published a ScrapBook made at the Vintage Festival for a project Proboscis is participating in called Graffito – a collaborative iPhone/iPad app that lets people draw on a shared canvas. It was used in the Warehouse tent (which had a 1980s theme) as a collaborative VJ system displayed on a giant LED screen. A number of iPhones were lent out to people to draw with, as well as remote users playing from all over the world (the App is free to download from the AppStore).

For part of the 3 day festival, Jennifer Sheridan (Graffito’s project lead) sat in the control booth capturing snapshots of the screen and printing them off using a Polaroid PoGo printer (a very small portable printer that uses USB & Bluetooth to print ‘zero ink’ pictures from mobiles or digital cameras). She then stuck them into a blank eNoteBook I had designed especially for Graffito. Once back from the festival we disassembled the ‘ScrapBook’, scanned it in and republished it so anyone (whether at the festival, a remote participant or just someone interested) could have a hand made tangible souvenir of the project and the event. The process was very simple (though not helped by Apple’s blocking of Bluetooth connection to the PoGo printer on the iPhone) and points the way to similar uses for lots of other projects. In fact the whole process could easily be copied by anyone with an iPhone : simply download the Graffito app, start drawing and use the ‘snapshot’ feature to capture pictures of your favourite screens. Then download the blank version of the Graffito ScrapBook from diffusion.org.uk, print out and stick in the screen shots to make your own personal Graffito ScrapBook. You don’t need a PoGo printer (though they’re now very cheap to buy, around £20) – you could just print out the pictures on normal paper and glue them in.

As we develop Graffito further, part of our thinking will focus around how to personalise the creation of tangible souvenirs from the project even further. It could be possible, for instance, to request a series of screen shots to be taken from a particular time sequence and made into an eBook or StoryCube. This could be particularly fun for a group of people using it to draw collaboratively and could be combined with maps of where users are located in the world (there’s a short movie demonstrating this on the Graffito website).

I think this ScrapBook is a great example of just how simple it can be to design and make custom eNoteBooks or ScrapBooks for projects and events with bookleteer. Using simple and cheap tools like the PoGo printer, its possible to capture and print images using mobile phones (or cameras via USB) which can be stuck in and notes written around them. Whether its for festivals, art events, schools projects, field research or sports events, its possible to create beautiful and engaging ScrapBooks ‘in the field’ – as they are happening – that can be shared with anyone afterwards.

Get in touch if you’d like us to design a way of creating tangible souvenirs like this for your project or event.

This recently published eBook by Julie Anderson and Salah Mohamed Ahmed describes the progress of the Berber-Abidiya Archaeological Project in Dangeil, Sudan. Julie is Assistant Keeper of Sudanese and Egyptian Antiquities at the British Museum and Salah works for the National Corporation for Antiquities and Museums, Sudan and the eBook was written for a conference Julie attended. It was then printed at A5 size using the bookleteer Publish and Print on Demand. Download the A3 / Ledger PDFs here.

The eBook is full of rich details about the site in Dangeil (which sounds huge – 300x400m) and the remarkable and beautiful statues and buildings they’ve uncovered there. Intriguingly the site consists of several mounds covered with fragments of red bricks, sandstone, pot shards and plaster and each mound represents a well-preserved ancient building. It’s even possible to see traces of colour left on the stones.

As well as describing the buildings there are also fascinating insights into the rituals, food, rulers and everyday life of the temple, including the information that the Kushite language, Meoitic Meroitic, is one of the few remaining languages in the world which has not yet been translated. And running all through the book are casual glimpses into the detective work of the archeologist.

The idea is that Salah will now translate the eBook into Arabic so it can be distributed to schools around the archeological site to help them understand what’s going on and what has been uncovered. Which would be very exciting for bookleteer because that would allow us to produce our first eBook using the Arabic font and right-to-left reading that we worked so hard to include!

Last week Proboscis got back a delivery of PPOD books commissioned by Cosmo China in Bloomsbury, London.  The book commemorates 20 years of Cosmo China and its artists. The shop was begun by Josie Firmin and Christopher Stangeways and produces handpainted ceramics. During it’s lifetime three of Josie’s sisters have painted china for Cosmo (and continue to do so!) as has Josie’s dad, Peter Firmin, who’s perhaps better known as the creator of Bagpuss along with Oliver Postgate.

Pages for Josie Firmin and Peter Firmin from Cosmo China PPOD book

For the anniversary of Cosmo China 20 artists were asked to paint a plate and the book celebrates these special plates and the artists who created them. My favourite part of the book though is the front cover which uses the new attribute of bookleteer that allows you to have a full-cover image and features an illustration of the Cosmo China shop front.

The PPOD book is going to be sold in Cosmo China however because it was made on bookleteer you can download your own copy from diffusion.org.uk.

James Bridle of booktwo.org was one of the participants at the Pitch Up and Publish: Augmented Reading a couple of weeks ago, and he talked a little about the idea of books as symbols and the related BookCube project he’d done using the bookleteer API.

Here, I’ll just give a summary of the project. James has written a post on booktwo.org describing the project which I really recommend you to read because it’s seriously interesting and covers more topics than I describe here…

James started with the idea that the lifespan of a book looks something like the drawing in the image above. There is a short period of the book-as-object acting as it’s own advertisement, then a period of time where you are reading the book and taking in the content, then during the final, and longest, amount of time the book-as-object acts as a souvenir of the reading period.

James has already begun to address the idea of digital souvenirs for eBooks with his bkkeepr project and with the bookleteer API he extended this to create automatically generated Bookcubes. These cubes display the information collected by bkkeepr and includes an image of the book cover. Over time James imagines the Bookcubes to build up on your shelf as a visible and tangible souvenir of your eBook reading. For bookleteer, this is an interesting tangent – instead of being an object to read it becomes an object that marks the fact that reading has taken place – and the content becomes separated from the form.

Writing yesterday about the importance of the tangible paper form of bookleteer reminded me of the ‘A Little Something About Me‘ project by Bev Carter carried out in 2007 – 2009 as part of Proboscis’ Generator Case Studies Residency Programme.

Bev wanted to make connections between her local school in England and the schoolchildren in Umulogho village, Imo state, Nigeria and the eBooks provided her with a way to do this.

The first eBook of the project, ‘A Little Something About Me‘, contained paintings, pictures and information by the students of the local school in Umulogho. The children were asked to write ‘a little something about me’ describing what learning meant to them, their hopes, fears, likes, dislikes etc. These eBooks were brought back to the UK and taken into Bev’s local school where the British children read and responded to the Umulogho eBooks helping to devise the questions for a second eBook called ‘Kedu? How Are You?‘ which was made online then printed out and sent out to Umologho early in 2008.

From Kedu? How Are You? eBook: Questions about Umulogho by British schoolchildren illustrated with pictures by students in Umulogho from the A Little Something About Me eBooks

The ‘Kedu? How Are You?‘ eBook (Kedu means ‘How are you? in Igbo, the main language spoken in Umulogho Village) was designed as a notebook to be completed by the children in Umulogho, responding to questions asked about them and their lives by British schoolchildren. Filling in the eBook also enabled the children of Umulogho to ask questions of the children in Watford such as ‘what seasons do you have in England?’ and ‘what religions do you have?’

Response to the Kedu? How Are You? eBook by students in Umulogho

In October 2008 the completed Kedu eBooks were taken back to the school in Watford that had asked the original questions. The students were delighted to see the answers to their questions, such as ‘are there any crocodiles in the village stream?’ (some Umulogho students had seen some and others hadn’t) and got the students talking about the differences between the everyday lives of the Umulogho children and their own – for example, what time they wake up in the morning and what they do before school as most students in Umulogho were awake by 5.30 am and had gone to the village stream and back to collect water before going to school.

Response to the Kedu? How Are You? eBook by students in Umulogho

Even though the school in Umulogho doesn’t yet have a computer or internet access, it was still possible to send and receive paper copies of the eBooks, and by scanning in the completed eBooks the results could be shared online. In this way a conversation was able to be held across continents, cultures and technological formats.

Read more about the project and download the Umulogho eBooks at diffusion.org.uk

On Sunday (June 20th) I got an email from James asking if it was possible to have some copies of the eNotebooks we made last year printed up via bookleteer’s PPOD service for him to take to Reite village on his next trip to Papua New Guinea in July. I just had to remake the scanned-in versions into new eBooks with bookleteer (which took about an hour for all 4), and I then sent the eBooks to press first thing on Tuesday morning. In a super quick turnaround time, I collected the printed versions this morning (Friday 25th).

Porer & Pinbin’s visit was part of the larger Melanesia Project, a conference for which happens next week (June 28th & 29th) at UCL’s Anthropology Department. We’re looking forward to sharing the printed eBooks with colleagues there and getting their feedback and ideas on using bookleteer and the eBooks as innovative ways to capture and share field work, both with each other and with the communities they work with and study.

We’d love to hear from other anthropologists and ethnographers (and any other disciplines too) interested in using bookleteer and the eBooks as creative and shareable notebooks for fieldwork – please get in touch.

Anyway, I have a confession.

In Proboscis studio contemplating the merits of two storycubes

While I appreciate the digital-ness of bookleteer eBooks and storycubes and how they can be shared around the world with friends and strangers, what I really like about them is their low-tech, tangible, crafty, physical-ness.

At the most recent Pitch Up and Publish one of the participants said they hadn’t really understood the eBooks until they printed them out and made them up and that’s exactly how I feel about them. So for the next couple of months I’m going to explore the eBooks and storyCubes as objects.

This gives me a great excuse to scour the web for inspiring examples of books that are experienced as objects, and cubes that do more. And then to try out some ideas of my own and see what can be done with a few sheets of A4 paper, the bookleteer software and imagination.I’m very excited about it… and all the outcomes will be posted here, come back soon to check how I’m getting along!

*In case you want to know more, I’m interested in all things around making, technology and art. And I’m especially curious about the places where these things overlap. (I’m fascinated by people and cities too but that’s another story..)

My name is J.-Thomas Maillioux, and I’ve been working as the librarian for the collège Evariste Galois middle school since 2005. I’ve recently started to use the bookleteers to create “adventure books” for our first-year pupils’ library orientation program in a format both convenient and original. The flexibility of the Bookleteer publishing platform has also allowed me to quickly and easily implement the modifications suggested by my own observations, or advice from the students and teachers involved in the orientation program.

Download A4 | US Letter PDF 486Kb

I’ve also been able to sit down with small group of students to discuss what they would do with the Bookleteers : they suggested uses both for school (custom booklets for note taking on school trips, tutorials or HOWTOs for specific activities in sciences and technology classes, reminders while giving presentations in front of a class) and home (grocery shopping, tasks listing, books and stories writing or games) that make me think that, with the correct amount of support from their teachers in acquiring and supporting the necessary skills, they should be able to make the Bookleteers and the publishing platform their own relatively quickly : a good way to reconcile them not only with the printed word, but also with their printed word – that what they write, too, can be and deserves being made into a book with very little hassle.

We’d love to hear more testimonials of how bookleteer, the eBooks and StoryCubes are being used – please send your feedback to us at bookleteer at proboscis.org.uk