This archive review comes courtesy of my fellow Future Jobs Fund employee here at Proboscis, Mandy Tang. The Storycube and accompanying eBook were actually the very first publications she created here – the ambitious concept speaks volumes about her work.
Picking a path, the player follows the line around the cube, until they reach one of six destinations, each with a different icon representing a personality type. The player then checks the eBook to read the corresponding description.
“What Type Are You?” really takes advantage of the cube form – the shape is integral to the game (as Mandy says: “When holding a cube you find yourself tempted to see whats on the other faces”). It’s also the first game in the archive – hopefully it will inspire fellow game-makers to create more. Download it here, and play it for yourself.
These extraordinary creations are individually handmade by Stephanie Anderson, cut from paper and card. Each zine is a different burger with varying paper ingredients, and is limited to 20 copies. I suppose these are as far away from the typical imaginings of what a zine is, but innovation and creativity do tend to rock the boat.
These zines are tiny – no larger than a 10¢ piece. Apparently these are the smaller versions of Stephanie’s original Hamburger zine.
It would be great to create similar things by publishing an eBook with various ingredients that just need to be cut out and coloured in, then assembled. A cookbook for paper food – each page a different dish!
This illustrated scheduler was created by Alice Angus, whilst experimenting with eBook notebooks. Each month (a page) is adorned with one of her works, and writing spaces for tasks and notes. The simple design framework, coupled with her lovely ephemeral illustrations, combine to be one of the most visually pleasing (and functional) eBooks in the Diffusion Archive, even more so with the A3 version.
I rarely take notes, or form plans on paper, but even I’d be tempted to break this habit if it was on this canvas. I’d imagine it would initially be hard to write over the illustrations – I wouldn’t want to spoil them!
Perhaps having a beautiful notebook makes you more organised. Try it yourself – you can download it here.
Le Dot is an A6, 12 page, black and white zine by Anthony Zinonos. Each page has a clipping from an old photograph, and an orange dot sticker placed in somewhere that interacts with it in a comical way. It’s such a simple idea, but it works surprisingly well. I love how the sparse white background contrasts strikingly with the glaring orange dots, and highlights how alien they look compared to the black and white images, yet they still fit so perfectly. It was also easy to make it seems; just photocopied and stapled.
Another zine by Anthony, “theBLUEbits”, works in a similar idea; this time sticking hand cut pieces of blue paper with the images.
These have got me thinking about how easy it would be to make similar zines with bookleteer. Readers could download the base eBook, then customise it with their own materials, or a separate downloadable sheet with pre-designed shapes. Pop-up zines could also be created, in the same way that Mandy’s Tangled Threads eBook had a page with cut-out inserts and instructions. Swapping these around with other readers would be great, to see how many variations on a single template could be found.
This set of Storycubes was part of a briefing pack for the Perception Peterborough workshops, set up to develop environmental initiatives and tackle green issues that Peterborough might be facing in the future. Created by Matt Huynh and Proboscis, these beautiful cubes were intended t0 visually display the themes in the project and kick start ideas. A set of eight cubes, linked together with stickers, they can be manipulated into many shapes, each formed side showing a set of illustrations with a common theme.
I love Matt Huynh’s style; wonderfully quirky and charming, they work so well on the small panels, almost resembling an abstract comic, or an illustrated Rubik’s cube. Whilst twisting the cubes into different forms, its hard to resist becoming mesmerised, as the different colours and shapes unfold inwards and outwards, kaleidoscopically.
It would be interesting to see comic authors working within this format, each set of panels representing short tales that can be switched around, letting the reader form the story by making different shapes. This relates to Hypercomics, which I’ve blogged about before, where different outcomes are possible with each read, shifting the reading experience from flat and passive, to three dimensional and interactive.
I stumbled across this gem when following an excellent Zines page on Facebook, run by Alex Zamora of Fever Zine. An A5, 15 page, black and white illustrated Zine by the Lindström Effect collective, “HADRÖN” is a mock instruction manual for the Large Hadron Collider, in the style of IKEA furniture instructions.
The comical idea of using a self-assembly furniture guide for one of the most expensive and complicated scientific experiments ever is ludicrously funny, and it works so well as the diagrams and typefaces are spot on; there’s even a CERN logo in the vein of IKEA’s. I’ve never had to assemble any IKEA furniture, but I’ve heard many tales of frustration from those that have – the LHC might have turned out very differently if the engineers had followed this guide (I’m sure the Lindström Effect might even cite personal experience as inspiration for this Zine).
I’m going to be delving into the Diffusion archive to highlight my favourite eBooks and StoryCubes on a regular basis, in a bid to showcase how people have used them in exceptional and innovative ways.
First off is “Cummerbundery Volume 1: The Collected Tweets Of Brandon Cummerbund” by Russ Bravo, an eBook compiling various tweets from his Twitter comedy alter-ego, Brandon Cummerbund – a “Victorian wit, man about town and amateur taxidermist”. These hilarious, satirical and often surreal vignettes are presented very simply, (almost in the manner of a Twitter feed) and the contrast between Cummerbund’s ridiculous, outdated manner and activities, and the short functional format of Tweets, is genius. Some choice snippets:
“Fusty Montgomery borrowed putter. Twigs in the
marmalade. Mrs C went shopping. Staff nervous.
Eggs overcooked. Monkey of the day: gibbon. “
“Toast has its uses in hand to hand combat. Chum
of mine: Mangrove van Flagbutterer – well meaning
Dutch philanthropist. Breakfast: kedgeree.”
“Aged aunt coming to stay. Attempts to book
holiday in Folkestone have failed. Mongoose
acquired, named Wilf. Cheese: Red Leicester.”
This move from transitory digital messages, to a permanent print publication has an interesting by-product. When the Tweets are placed alongside each other in print form, they resemble diary entries, or, due to the lack of dates, verse; both forms befitting of a Victorian chap.
Brandon Cummerbund - A striking resemblance to Simon Callow?
I’ve just made a simple custom notebook for all participants of our first Pitch In & Publish: City As Material event, based on the topic of “Streetscapes”. It contains an overview of City As Material as a theme, as well as some suggestions and interesting locations to kick-start the creative process, and of course, blank pages for idea’s and sketches. It will be interesting to see if and how this notebook is used, as personally I never seem to plan any creative work, preferring to launch straight in. Obviously this affects how idea’s are formed, and often their practical application might suffer as a result, or on the upside, be far more fresh and exciting then I had ever anticipated.
The creative process, and the difficulty in expressing pure idea’s across mediums interest me, and I’ll be looking into how people are inspired to create, and the methods they use to do so, on the bookleteer blog in the near future. It would be great for it to become more than a one-sided blog, and become a platform for people to exchange ideas and advice via feedback, perhaps even collaborate; almost an online Pitch In & Publish session.
While Mandy was out at lunch Alice and I pounced on the StoryCube puzzle she’s working on because, well, because it looks gorgeous! Pencil sketches of farmyard animals, sea creatures, flowers, kittens, insects and snakes are scattered across a set of nine cubes and lie on a background of shades of blue. The sketches cross over from one side of the cube to another but change as you rotate the cube so that viewing different sides give the sketches a fantastical feel where kittens have flowers for feet and cows have snakes instead of mouths.
The nine cubes are intended as a puzzle with the goal being to match up all of the sketches of one type across all nine cubes. Sounds simple doesn’t it.. well, Alice and I didn’t manage it in the time Mandy was out for lunch!
ps. I also have to say good-bye today. This will be my last regular post for the bookleteer blog because I begin a full-time research position on Monday. I’ve been working with Proboscis on and off for the past five years and it’s been an incredible journey. I can’t thank Giles and Alice enough for the opportunities I’ve had while I’ve been here – and especially for giving me the chance to meet and work with all the fabulous talented people who’ve been in the studio over that time. Good luck with everything, folks!
On the fabulous The Literary Platform I came across this video Ideo have produced showing three concepts they have created around the future of the book. I love Ideo, they consistently come up with inventive and imaginative technological developments that take account of social factors and personal practices. However, I have to say, I am disappointed with their ideas for the future of the book and I’m surprised that they appear to have overlooked so many of the interesting questions around books as objects, the challenges of e-Readers and the augmented reading experience that are currently being considering in so much detail by others.
All three of the concept designs (called Newton, Coupland and Alice) are shown as prototypes for the iPad. This suggests to me that the idea that a book might be a souvenir of an experience (e.g. James Bridle) or an object for sharing (e.g. Bookcrossing) does not appear to have been considered in the design process. In my exploration of augmented reading over the past few months I have come to think of a book as the amalgamation of object, content, design, distribution method, author and reader. It might be getting a little pedantic but I would say that what Ideo have produced are prototypes for the Future of Reading rather than the Future of the Book.
So what will this future reading experience be? We are offered three versions.
Newton might best be described as an application for managing material already published on the Internet. It allows you to collate, compare and contrast different sources and materials around a particular topic.
Coupland is a form of book-related user-generated content and social network. Reading lists and recommendations can be compiled and shared allowing everyone to see and comment on the most popular books within a professional network. Individuals can contribute book reviews and content can be shared between different organisations and networks.
Alice combines hypertext, hypermedia and location-based services to create an augmented, reader-created narrative path through a story. Primarily presented as text-based Alice suggests that readers actions (in the example, tilting the iPad in a particular direction) might open up new branches to the story. Other actions might include being in a specific location where a particular set of GPS co-ordinates would trigger more of the story.
One of the most interesting aspects to me is how these future ‘books’ conceive of authors. While all three concepts require authors for the ‘book’ to be complete they each have a different model. Newton relies on writers who are producing content elsewhere on the Internet and Coupland relies on people within an organisation creating content for the ‘book’. Only Alice has bespoke writing and a dedicated author at the heart of the project which is then augmented by existing content. These approaches to authorship are not new of course but I find it fascinating that Ideo consider all of them to be examples of ‘books’ and I wonder how these fit with my concept of book-as-object-plus-content-plus-design-plus-distribution method-plus-reader. I can’t help feeling that the ecology of books is broader and more diverse than these concept designs acknowledge.
