The Page E-Newspaper Prototype
JA
May 06
First off there was Mag+, a prototype designed by Swedish media giant Bonnier and design firm BERG that sought to bring magazines into the digital era and has since been successfully adapted for the iPad. Now, the same sort of thinking is being applied to newspapers, this time by graduate students at the Art Center College of Design: Manny Darden, Jae Yeop Kim, and Scott Liao.
The Page, an ‘adaptive delivery e-newspaper’, seeks to combine the look and tactility of physical reading with all that technology has to offer. Liao, Darden and Kim sought to replicate the ‘folding behaviours’ of newspapers by creating a four-column system using Smart Paper or ‘pulp-based computing’, which according to the New Yorker’s Book Bench, ‘embeds wires, sensors, and computer chips into actual paper during the looming process’. Smart Paper is thus flexible, durable and weatherproof.
This technology is still in its early stages however and so it is yet to be seen whether prototypes like The Page will be truly viable. The e-newspaper involves the usual search, scrolling and social networking functions, and allows articles to shift and minimize depends on how you fold the reader.
You can see how it works through the demo video below, as well as via an interactive function on the team’s website.
THE PAGE_Adaptive Delivery Device from Scott Liao on Vimeo.
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Comments
06 May 10 at 9:58
looks great, but I can’t get the link to work either here or on the site.
The interesting thing about developments such as these is that they reject, to a great extent, the grammar and conventions, with regard to presentation on the web, developed over the past fifteen years or so, for a more traditional print-based columnar layout.
Are these devices and the Kindle and Ipad-type devices going to change the way we access online news etc in such a way that we may see a change as fundamental as that of Web 2.0?
Will we see the division between print and online news finally disappear? Will this kind of technology be the key to solving the how are newspapers going to make a quid question?
So many questions so little time – very exciting stuff.
...06 May 10 at 10:18
I also think it’s interesting to think about the various approaches being shopped around when it comes to digital technology. Eg. should we try and imitate the printed form as the Page, Kindle, Apple iBookstore does, with virtual spines, covers, columns and faux bookshelves etc, or do we need to think more loosely (perhaps like the projects done by the Institute for the Future of the Book)? Is the answer simple to replicate what’s been done before, or does this hold us back?
The video seems to be working on our site. The interactive link on the Page can take a while to load and is a bit fiddly, but worth a look nonetheless.
...06 May 10 at 10:48
I couldn’t get the interactive function working either – any movements / clicks didn’t seem to register.
I think a shift towards column-based layouts is a positive and necessary one. Years of using the internet, reading packaging and being buried in comics has made reading a standard A4 document a task and a half for me and I know a lot of people that feel the same way.
...06 May 10 at 10:53
Yes I did find some clicks seem to move the e-newspaper and some didn’t on the Page website. But the accompanying video still gives a good idea of how it would work.
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