Design Phase

Goals: Bridge the digital and physical spaces by networking the books with a shelf, allowing the user to experience viscerally the book and it's connections.

My thesis is to provide a visceral experience to the library user, to preserve the book by not using any screen interface (i.e. PDA, cell phone, or computer screen). This system will be designed around the current library classification system, and will highlight relevant information in new ways.

I plan on designing two low resolution shelves. The first shelf will show how this system will work globally in the library. The first is a shelf that is connected to the library card. At the end of each shelf system, there will be an RFID reader. The search for books will begin at a computer terminal. Books related to the search will be saved on a library card, which is also an RFID tag. When the user approaches the stack, he/she will scan their library card on the reader, and the books that are saved will light up (momentarily) and fade out over time (10 or 15 minutes), indicating a decay. If another user shows up and scans their library card, their books will also light up, but their light signals are brighter to indicate that they are the most current searches. If there are two people in the same stack, perhaps this shelf will encourage discourse between the two.

The second shelf will be a prototype of a more localized search. When a user takes a book off the shelf, books that are connected to it will light up, and the more relevant books to a user's specific search will light brighter. I have researched how Google's search terms for scanned books, and will translate the most useful in a physical interaction. For instance, keyword. In Google's digital interface, the keyword is highlighted throughout the scanned pages of the book. In this physical prototype, the shelf will filter the most relevant book according to number of keywords. For instance, if I was looking for a book about Williamsburg, I would go to that section of the library, and all the books about Williamsburg will light up, but the most relevant book will light up brighter than the others because it will search in the database for the number of keywords. Other filters I am researching are citations (author's recommendations), frequency of a book taken off the shelf, frequency of books checked out, topics, and expert-related filters.

Research for designing the interaction with these constraints:

"Foucault looked at the apparent physical unity of the printed book as a prototype for the unity of a professional discourse. A book, while appearing to be a complete, self-contained object--a model of thingness--is, in fact, dispersed across a network of other texts. Likewise, the cumalative knowledge of a discipline is not an 'enormous book that is gradually and continuously being written,' but is, instead, a 'system of dispersion.'"--Lupton

"The frontiers of a book are never clear-cut: beyong the title, the first lines, and the last full stop, beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references to other books, and other texts, other sentences; it is a node within a network. The book is not simply an object that one holds in one's hands' its unity is variable and relative. As soon as one questions that unity it loses its self-evidence; it indicates itself, constructs itself, only on the basis of a complex field of discourse.(23)" --Foucault

1. Search [Google] versus Categorization [library - not dynamic or applicable to information, but just accommodates the constraint that staff doesn't have to physically reshelve the books]
2. unique tagging provides a type of filtering
3. categorizing for the future and subcategories [HIERARCHY] versus a lot of links (Berners-Lee), "everything can have a unique identifier" --Shirky