Curiosity
A handmade book project & experiment in creating a tactile user experience story through quotes.
My interactive curiosity book is centred around taking the viewer on a journey as they travel though the pages. I wanted to emphasis both the intellectual/cognitional interaction, as well as a physical interaction that literally ties the user to the book by focusing on the interaction that the viewer has with the words on the page.
The theme of the book is the journey of learning, inspired by the scientific method. Quotes were chosen to follow along with the journey of: watching others, experimenting/trying yourself, learning the history and background information, imagining new outcomes, and finally revisiting old learnings with new information. This progression is very individualistic, and mirrors the individual experience the viewer has with the book.
The design of the book includes a sans serif humanist font, to represent the bridge happening between science and humanity as seen within the quotes. The printed part of the book has only black type to allow the reader to project their own interpretation into the book, the pages act like a blank canvas paired with inspiration to get the reader thinking and reflecting. Certain words are enlarged, which emphasizes and summarizes the meaning of the quote, and the rest of the type in the quote is inset to create more depth to the layout. Each spread was created to specially fit the emphasized words, while retaining the overall similar layout in terms of quote location and alignment, as well as quote author location.
The string letters filling in the cutouts represent windows into the unconscious, and how it may look at each stage of the journey. A blue thread leads through the entire book, representing the individual’s line of thought and consciousness, and was used to bind the book together both symbolically and literally. At the beginning stages of the book, the strings are very simple and contained, and as the book progresses towards more complex thoughts and ideas the strings follow suit. Several pages also invite the user to interact with the strings beyond just feeling where it protrudes from the cutouts: the user must pull aside parts to reveal the words, and in another example are invited to create something with the available strings. This second example was chosen as a metaphor for creating something new from your past knowledge and experiences since it uses the coloured strings from earlier in the book. Overall, the colour-coded strings that create the cutout type create a more complex experience for the viewer. It leads them to curiosity through interaction, hence the title of the quote book.