WEEK 46 - Future of magazine distribution

What we have done: We have divided the group so that two of us are focusing on creating the movie and two of us are focusing on the book chapter. Robin is going to be the leader of the book chapter and will work together with Olga, whereas Sebastian and Sara will be doing the movie. For the movie, we have been looking into several options, such as filming, animating and stop motion. We finally chose stop motion as we think this will be the easiest way to communicate our idea without encountering too many technical difficulties.

What we will do: We are going to start writing the book chapter and have it finished for Wednesday so we can proof read it for Thursday. We are also going to begin with the stop motion movie and make every scene, as well as try out different settings for the camera and how to take the photographs and set the pictures/second in a good way.

Problems encountered: Our main problems have been with the stop motion movie, as none of us have been working especially much with making film or for that matter stop motion, but after spending a lot of time youtubing, googling and discussing we now feel a bit more confident on how to do the movie (even if there are still many question marks)

Changes in the project: Our project has been rolling pretty straight forward and we’ve been productive during the meetings. The only real changes in the project have been dividing the labour and coming up with new ideas for the movie.

Week 44 - The future of magazine distribution

What we have done: We have gone through the interview with Christer Lie and made notes of the most important issues; mainly that Christer believes that there will exist cheap printers in the future that support our idea, but he also believes in the element of surprise and professionally composed content and design. This was also present from the interviews and observations of the magazine consumers, where many people seemed to prefer the element of surprise and good design. Although there were also many who would like the option of being able to customize the magazine. We also interviewed Johan Stenberg, who had the opinion that our idea could be possible in the future, but only if the on demand-printers could be as cost beneficial as the low cost of printing today. He did however believe that societies of the future will be different, and that the distribution of magazines will have to be adapted to that change. This new information has led to some changes in our initial idea, and we are now focused on having the on demand-printer mainly for customized magazines, and support the idea of a digital magazine library at train stations and airports by basing it on the idea of a future society in which ubiquitous computing will be more developed.

What we will do: We now feel that the empirical information gathering is complete, and will now be focusing more on developing and presenting our idea to prepare for the mid crit next week. This will probably be done with sketches and powerpoint.

Problems encountered: We haven’t encountered many problems, and feel that we have accomplished a lot during the time we have had. The only problem we can see is that we are still not really sure how to present our idea in the best way.

Changes in the project: We are still focusing on the consumers perspective, but have narrowed down our user group to customers present at train stations and airports, and have chosen to pay about as much attention to the digital magazine library of the ubiquitous future, as the on demand printer.

Other: Otherwise things have been working out fine, and we are enjoying the project!

The future of magazine distribution

The future of magazine distribution

How can the distribution of magazines at train stations and airports be revolutionized in the future in order to account for the customers’ preferences within these settings?

Our vision is based on three main consumer behaviours having been observed in context. First, consumers tend to enjoy taking their time, reading magazines as a means of time consumption while waiting for the train/plane. Second, many consumers enjoy the element of surprise in magazines. Finally, about half of the consumers would like to be able to customize their own magazine.

We believe that the best solution is to remove many of the physical magazines and create space for a small digital library. The library contains furnishing aimed for relaxation, and digital tablets through which the customer not only reads the available magazines, but also has the possibility to customize their own magazine by combining parts of different issues of the same magazine. The consumer can also choose to add “surprise content” where the amount of surprise content being displayed in the magazine is completely up to the consumer to decide. Once a magazine is chosen/customized/complete, it can either be loaded to a personal tablet reader, or be printed on demand in the store using technologies for nano-printing. Finally, consumers in a hurry also have the possibility of logging on to the their profiles on the magazine network, choose or customize the magazines as they wish, and then buy the physical version of them in the store, or download them to their tablets.

Future of distribution - Week 43

Group name: The future of magazine distribution

What we have done:

Interview with Christer Lie: We interviewed Christer Lie about printing technologies to get a better understanding of whether our idea of having small print on demand-printers would even be possible in the future. Lie thought that this would be possible in the future, and mentioned specific techniques (which we will look into further), and also gave us some other interesting input.

Observing magazine customers: We observed ~15 magazine customers during their daily habits of purchase, and made notes of gender, age and other relevant information for their behaviour (if they were stressed, took their time, walked around with magazines etc)

Interviewing magazine customers: We also interviewed ~15 magazine customers during their daily habits of purchase (different people than those we observed), and asked them four general questions which we find important for getting a better understanding of customers’ behaviours (“What are your usual habits when buying magazines?”, “How do you choose magazines?“, “What do you think about digital magazines?”, and “Would you like to be able to customize your own magazine?”)

What we will do: We will structure the interview from Christer Lie, as well as the observations of the magazine customers, and interviews with the magazine customers. We will also try to get an interview with Johan Stenberg.

Problems encountered: In the beginning we had some trouble finding a good way to communicate with each other, but now we have created a facebook group and also use gmail. Otherwise the only problems really have been troubles in getting an interview with Johan Stenberg (we are waiting for him to answer our email), and dealing with stressed customers.

Changes in the project: We have decided to focus more on the customers needs as opposed to what would be beneficial for the magazine stores. We are thinking more in terms of having small on demand-printers which could be placed in a variety of places (airports, trains, stores, etc.), and the actual features of these printers will be determined when we have got a better understanding of what the main needs from the customers seem to be.

Other: Otherwise things have been working out fine, and we are enjoying the project!