How to sell a kindle.....???

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Something to think about amazon sell the kindle as a new wireless reading device...

A new wireless reading device... Last time I checked a book was a wireless reading device?
I would raise this as at the point in the research in being related for the following reason
- The kindle is a new piece of technology - should not be viewed to have to compete with books but instead provide a different experience. (has though it been designed with this in mind...?)

Your not going to have the affordances of a book but instead have new the new benefits that technology offers - this is the reason for adoption. Is this not then what it could be sold on?

In a similar way would face similar challenges in a lab book - and similar with the editor.

This may be open to continued questions and although may be a bit condescending towards amazon I think at this point can be questioned.

The selling point....

A great article taken from Scientific American on Science 2.0 -- Is Open Access Science the Future?

The following quotes have been taken from the article as the quote taken from another source has been

Web 2.0 technologies open up a much richer dialogue, says Bill Hooker, a postdoctoral cancer researcher at the Shriners Hospital for Children in Portland, Ore., and author of a three-part survey on open-science efforts that appeared at 3 Quarks Daily (www.3quarksdaily.com), where a group of bloggers write about science and culture.

“To me, opening up my lab notebook means giving people a window into what I’m doing every day,” Hooker says. “That’s an immense leap forward in clarity. In a paper, I can see what you’ve done. But I don’t know how many things you tried that didn’t work. It’s those little details that become clear with an open [online]notebook but are obscured by every other communication mechanism we have. It makes science more efficient.”

The above scenario I think sets out more clearly the selling point as such for the research - I also see it linking with the point of how technology and paper are complementary for the reason that if the paper is obscuring a communication/workflow path because of the affordances it has as mentioned in the scenrio. I would see then exploration of if/how the elab book can enhance the workflow and most importantly be part of the workflow.
This is what must be achived must ensure not a focus on what a lab books functionailty is, but instead on actually what it is.

Finally the last quote below I think captures a selling point, as well as highlighting the risks and dangers that scientists are so wary about. Taking the position as an advocate for the research, it is important to have a wider perspective in order to fully appreciate the workflow.

"That jump in efficiency, in turn, could greatly benefit society, in everything from faster drug development to greater national competitiveness.Of course, many scientists remain wary of such openness—especially in the hypercompetitive biomedical fields, where patents, promotion and tenure can hinge on being the first to publish a new discovery. For these practitioners, Science 2.0 seems dangerous: putting your serious work out on blogs and social networks feels like an open invitation to have your lab notebooks vandalized—or, worse, your best ideas stolen and published by a rival.To advocates, however, an atmosphere of openness makes science more productive. “When you do your work online, out in the open,” Hooker says, “you quickly find that you’re not competing with other scientists anymore but cooperating with them.”

The argument of now with a move towards science 2.0 that your not competing but instead co-operating may require a full social culture change. Question if such instances have occurred before in work environments. Is this something that has to be forced upon people to be really effective ?

Social affordances

A really interesting article on the concept of affordances from affordances evoked by social interaction highlighted several points to some of the current thoughts/reading/ideas.

" The concept of affordances, as introduced by Gibson (e.g., 1979), provides a way to describe the world that cuts across traditional subject-object dualities. Affordances go beyond value-free physical descriptions of the environment by expressing environmental attributes relative to humans. At the same time, they go beyond subjective interpretations (e.g., associations, schemas, or social conventions) by describing meaning relative to an objective physical world.

Affordances are primarily facts about action and interaction, not perception."

As technology is becoming more ubiquitous the concept of 'social affordance' , at first thought may provide an avenue of awareness to move towards the concept of 'invisible computing' as discussed by Don Norman. In such a way though that the step before this must be in an understanding of the situated actions per se as discussed by Lucy Suchman.

"Affordances exist not just for individual action, but for social interaction as well. Research on “social affordances” (e.g., Still & Good, 1991; Goldring, 1991) focuses on the possibilities for action that people offer one another and on the role of other people in pointing out new affordances (e.g., to babies). These are not social affordances, as defined above, but affordances for sociality."


I think this may be a start to inform the way in which I can think about the design environment/ecology by questioning the design of social affordances based upon an understanding of the ecology.

"Perhaps the most important affordance of the everyday world lacking in media spaces is the ability to move. As Gibson (1979) emphasised, movement is fundamental for perception.
We move towards and away from things, look around them, and move them so we can inspect them closely. Movement might allow people to compensate for the discontinuities and anisotropies of current media spaces (Gaver, 1992; c.f. Heath & Luff, 1991). Social interactions in media space would be better supported if people could explore remote sites as easily as they can move around their own rooms.

The ecological approach is useful in the design process because it describes perception and interaction in terms of the properties of the environment, as well as those of people, and design is fundamentally about manipulating the environment for people. Thus the ecological approach challenges researchers to avoid the temptation of using memory and inference in explanations of perception, and encourages them instead to discover the possibly high-level physical attributes that serve as information about the world."

And so my impression from this is that the 'Ecological approach' can look to challenge the way ubiquitous computing is perceived? And social interactions both with the artifact of the e-lab book and is ecology it operates within could be a way which to move forward with the e-lab book concept should operate.