Weekly status report, augmented magazines

Quite much have happened this week and finally it feels like we're getting somewhere...!

• What we have done

This week we finally came down to augmented magazines and their content as our main focus for the project after many discussions. We've been trying to get in touch with people and on tuesday we have an interview with the VICstudio at KTH and one more interview with Designingenjörerna where the date isn't decided yet about augmented reality and magazines. We've also done a survey about augmented reality and magazines that we hope people will answere to as soon as possible to get the view fron "the peoples" perspective about augmented reality and magazines. We have also started to divide the texts for the book that we will start to write on as soon as possible.

• What we will do

We will have the interview with VIC on tuesday and hopefully another with Designingenjörerna as soon as possible. The we will write at least one page each for the book until next friday. This week the main focus will be on the mid-crit and preparations for that.

• Problems encountered

This week we have not encountered any problems actually!

“The smell of a freshly printed book is the best smell in the world.” Karl Lagerfeld

http://www.steidlville.com/books/1312-Paper-Passion.html
Gerhard Steidl was first alerted to the importance of the smell of a book by Karl Lagerfeld, prompting a passion for paper and the composition of a scent on the pages of a book. To Wallpaper* magazine the pairing of the publisher with the perfumer seemed a natural partnership and so the idea for Paper Passion was born. Wallpaper* magazine commissioned master perfumer Geza Schoen to create a fragrance based on the smell of books to be part of the Wallpaper* magazine Handmade exhibition in Milan.

So now we can buy the perfume with the smell of book

Week 44 - Digital contact lenses as a window for future magazine reading. Complete immersion through magazines.

Group name : 
Digital contact lenses as a window for future magazine reading.
Complete immersion through magazines.

What we have done:
This week we have started to do some more reseach about augmented reality and also watched some videos on the concept of retina lenses and glasses. We have also done a concept video that we will present on November 9 witch is the mid-crit.


What we will do:
The mid-crit is coming up, so we will try to make a great presentation for the crit and also start to work on the material for the book.

Concept video on our subject: 

Week 44: Journalist Rockstars

Group name: Journalist Rockstars (or The Future of Journalism)

What we have done:
Since the last report we've continued brainstorming and developed our ideas for the future of journalism. From our first idea which was that crowdfunding would be the new way of financing journalists, we came out with the idea of a journalist rockstar. The rise of crowdfuding would force journalists to promote themselves and their work, and the rise of social media would offer new ways to do that, as well as new ways of paying for it.
 
The music industry shows a similar development, with artists having to make money through different channels than before. We believe in a similar development for the journalistic industry. So far we've interviewed two persons, both journalists but one being an author as well. They both have a connection to crowdfunding, one having partly made use of crowdfunding in order to finance a book release and the other, due to an interest in the subject, having made a research trip to the US to find out more about crowdfunding. They both had some valuable insights and one of them even confirmed our hypothetical idea of a more personalized journalism and a future development of newsmedia towards individual journalists being in the spotlight to a higher extent.

What we will do:
The mid-crit is coming up, so we have to focus on how we are going to make people understand our vision for the future of journalism. We also want to go deeper in this comparaison between the music industry and the future of journalism. To do so, we are planning to interview two more experts, one to go farther in the vision of crowdfunding, and the other to discuss about the new ways to promote yourself via social media.

No big problems have been encountered yet apart from uploading this document on time.

Group name: Readly (Spotify)

What we done: Since last status report we have invited and completed an designworkshop which we thought gave some interesting results. The focus group gave information on what functions the intended future user wanted and most needed on an digital magazine service. The designworkshop did not result in so much creative material which we hoped, but they told us what they thought was important for this service.
We also started a market analysis, which we divided within the project group. It is not done yet, but our goal is to be done with this next week.

What we will do: Next week we will analyze the result and see which functions and other features that is important for the target group. We are going to make some suggestions on basic prototypes, which are supposed to be used in the focus group, and as an first design. We are also going to decide whether we need to have an focus group or not.

Problems encountered: We have not decided if we are going to do a focus group or not. Some in the group think it is excrescent to make one.

Changes in the project: No changes so far, except the new name on the magazine service Readly.

Picture from our workshop.

Week 44: A Magazine For Several Senses

November 2 - Week 44

Group name: 
A magazine for several senses.

What we have done: 
This week, we have decided on a kind of logo for our project that connects with our slogan “as long as it makes sense.”












The search for people to contact has begun, first mails sent out. Quick responses from some.
An interview with Tobias Lindberg, Sveriges Tidskrifter, was held and gave us a lot of good information.

After the meeting we had this thursday we sort of decided that we should “be” a magazine and that should be published 4 times a year - one issue per season - and therefore be called Seasons.

Some experementing has started with the ambition of creating jello-paper. 

What we will do: 
Next week it’s time to analyse the answers from the interviews that will come out of the sent e-mails. Maybe we will establish contact with some of the persons that Tobias told us about, for example Mittuniversitetet in Sundsvall.

Main focus will be on building the structure for the mid-crit presentation but we will also look at the final presentation and what we could do there.

Problems encountered: 
Who will buy this kind of magazine? It’s probably not gonna be cheap so the “target group” is going to be quite small. Could we solve this with International distribution? It’s gonna be more expensive but maybe for subscribers?

Changes in the project: 
No concrete changes, but we sort of decided that the magazine should be a combination of cooking and gardening - more like a lifestyle magazine - instead of just one of them.

Other: 
Very good and creative meeting this thursday. Good feeling in the group!

MAGi - Status Report Week 44

1. Group name

MAGi - Magazine Intelligence

2. What we have done

• 2.1 Interview request

We have sent a interview request to an expert in Human Media Interaction at TU Delft in the Netherlands. His research consists of multimodal interactions, intelligent agents, and computational intelligence. We have a vision of a society who is used to live in intelligent environments in our project so his field of research is of great interest. Unfortunately we will have an interview not before 9th of November, but he approved that our project might be feasible until 2030.

We also got in touch with a professor at the Fraunhofer institute of digital media technology in Germany. He is an expert for the “integrated eye-tracker”, which is a special eye-tracking system, that is not needed to be calibrated before using. This field of research is one relevant part for our project. For our intelligent reading system we provide the function of recognizing the reader’s attendance. This might be feasible with an eye-tracking system, as you can see in this video:

Furthermore, we contacted experts of the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence, which is one of the world's largest nonprofit contract research institutes in the field of innovative software technology based on artificial intelligence methods. We hope to get possible interview partners in the fields “Intelligent User Interfaces” and “Agents and Simulated Reality”.

• 2.2 Preparing the interviews

In our weekly project meeting we collected questions for the expert interviews that we will send them in advance. The questions cover our predictions of the future life in 2030 and the plausibility of our prediction regarding their field of research.

• 2.3 Promotion material

We have created promotion material in the form of text and a logotype. It will be used to promote the presentation of our project in December.

3. What we will do

• 3.1 Interview

Hopefully we will have at least one interview with an expert before the mid crit. After the interview we will analyze the answers and revise our vision of MAGi - Magazine Intelligence.

• 3.2 Mid crit presentation

We will prepare for the mid crit session so our idea and vision is as clearly as possible, because then we will get so clearly feedback as possible.

• 3.3 Initial ideas for the script

In our final presentation we provide a short film. Next week we begin to plan how we can illustrate our message to the audience. Depending on how many experts we will interview next week, we probably will make it to a first draft of a complete script.

4. Problems encountered

None

5. Changes in the project

None