Whilst out and about in this foul weather we’ve all been experiencing I stumbled across a pop shop in the princess square arcade setup by a glasgow based headphones manufacturer Audio Chi. It’s certainly interesting to see a glasgow based independent audio manufacturer with a distinct emphasis on design.
It was great to chat to their lead product designer about the headphones in store and really find out about what makes the company tick, trying to find the perfect price point to sound and design ratio. My particular favourite part of the headphone design is the fabric breaded cables that detach from the headphone to reduce the need for repairs and damage to the headphones. I’ll certainly be interested to see what they produce in the future.
Allow me, if I may, to preface this post with a little background information. I was raised in Manchester, the most rejuvenated city in europe. The ten years of my life that preluded my move to glasgow were spent in a context of seeing brand new buildings built and old buildings restored and updated. Manchester in short has been very lucky to have had so much funding and backing to pull itself out of its post-industrial stage and to become a buzzing centre of modern service industries, such as graphic design.
Having moved up to glasgow, I realised just how much money has been thrown at improving and updating manchester. Glasgow is a great city, but it simply hasn’t had that kind of support. The nature of this I feel has somewhat affected the general outlook of the place and as such creativity and creative organisations have somewhat struggled to capture the publics imagination, more so with graphic design than fine art.
The reason I preface this post with this information is because I believe this is genuinely starting to change and that designers in glasgow have been increasing their efforts exponentially. The guys behind Long Lunch for instance have clearly put a great deal of effort into getting the design hub that is london to broaden its perspective and visit their friends further north.
Another positive note is the opening of GmbH book shop yesterday evening. In their own words “GmbH is an outlet for a wide range of magazines, journals and periodicals sourced from across the world. Focusing on bespoke publishing, art, fashion, design, film and music as well as covering lifestyle, culture and affairs.” Whilst this shop is slightly out of the way it is never the less a positive step forward and a new focal point for designers and a sign of their existence and place in Glasgow’s social existence.
Finally and in my eyes one of the biggest improvements is a new website Creative Everyone.Created by Kulor (London) and Mister (Glasgow). This website allows the user to pick their choice of creative subjects, event types and their location and then view what’s going on in their city that they might enjoy in a well polished and executed calendar format. My favourite feature is the ability to subscribe to your own feed through iCal, the calendar app for OSX which many creative types use regularly to schedule their work days. Being able to see every event I’ve decided to attend automatically appear in my schedule is the kind of leap that turns a site from being somewhat useful to an invaluable tool.
The combined effect of these various creative outlets for glasgow is a much needed and positive step that shows the talent and size of the design community in Glasgow that is often hidden or difficult to delve into for the casual user.
The clip above is some recent work by the well established and much respected design firm Ideo. It does however perfectly illustrate the flaws I feel every ebook reader has.
Ideo has called this the “The Future of the Book” but each concept completely fails to understand the book as an object and instead adds an unnecessary new layer that is almost entirely disconnected from the books essential form. There’s very little interaction between book and new media with the exception of the final concept which instead, changes the novel from a linear based narrative to a multi choice quiz game with details filled in somewhat pointlessly.
Whilst music made the digital transition fairly easily due to the bulky nature of CD’s and the simple fact that in the end, you still get audio through the same headphones. Digital books simply haven’t been as compelling due to the format of a traditional book still being desirable. Simply adding features on top of a traditional book isn’t enough to make a compelling use case, we as readers rarely switch randomly between multiple books or dip in and out of books in short ten minute bursts. If the core experienced can’t be enhanced then these new devices will struggle to take hold and only devices such as the iPad which do many other things and just happen to have books available on them, stand a chance in the longterm of taking books into the digital age.