Cheap print, networked screens and location-aware hardware could create a world where dynamic text is everywhere -- as ubiquitous and natural as our current media ecosystem of street signs, alarm clocks, news tickers and train tickets.
Design futurists BERG and ad agency Dentsu London, the team behind iPad Light Painting, have released two new videos for their "Making Future Magic" campaign. This two-part series on media surfaces includes "Incidental Media" and "The Journey."
"In contrast to a Minority Report future of aggressive messages competing for a conspicuously finite attention," writes Berg's Jack Schulze, "these sketches show a landscape of ignorable surfaces capitalising on their context, timing and your history to quietly play and present in the corners of our lives."
"All surfaces have access to connectivity," Schulze adds. "All surfaces are displays responsive to people, context, and timing. If any surface could show anything, would the loudest or the most polite win? Surfaces which show the smartest, most relevant material in any given context will be the most warmly received."
I'm particularly taken with the use of paper ephemera in both concept videos. The shift to networked digital communication is usually identified with a shift away from paper and to the screen, when it's actually anything but. If the identity-specific, instant-update expectations of what Schulze calls "app culture" were translated to print ephemera like coffee-shop receipts and train tickets -- and I think that translation is inevitable -- we start to see a new phase of print: really, a new kind of publishing.
I could spend paragraphs annotating each of the ideas and all of the tech here -- none of it new, just reconfigured -- but you'd be better off reading the BERG blog posts above instead.
As an American who regularly travels the postwar-era east coast regional rail system, for whom a Virgin Rail trip from London to Birmingham is already a kind of unimaginable, delightful future, this video leaves me with wonder. And not just wonder: patient reassurance that the future is already on the way.
See Also:
- Design Fiction: 'Making Future Magic,' Berg, Dentsu London ...
- Stop-Motion Animators Use iPad to Paint With Light
- Tokyo, Living Lab of Possible Futures
- 2-Channel Gives Japan's Famously Quiet People a Mighty Voice
- Patina and use-wear by BERG
- The City is A Battlesuit For Surviving the Future
- Digital Ink
- Flexible E-Paper on Its Way
