This presentation was only 3 minutes. There were some lovely archive nerds in the audience.
Slides
Script
[slide one]
What do this lamp, this corkscrew and the iPod have in common?
Other than the fact that they are all very colourful, they also all radically changed the meaning of their use in comparison to their predecessors.
[slide two]
Lamps are there to illuminate a room and look pretty.
But Yang LED was made to adapt to the mood of resident and is not even meant to be seen.
[slide three]
Corkscrews are there to open my wine
But this corkscrew by Alessi “dances” for you.
[slide four]
Portable music players allowed you to listen to music on the move.
But the iPod allowed you to cheaply buy songs from iTunes and then curate them into your own personal soundtrack.
[slide five]
All three of these examples and their respective change in meanings are the result of design-driven innovation a term used by the design scholar Roberto Verganti in a book by the same name.
Design-driven innovation works like this…
[slide six]
Here on this graph we have two axis: change in technology and a change in meaning both have a scale from incremental to radical change. In the corner we have market pull/user-centered design.
[slide seven]
Here we have the bubble design-driven innovation, where see radical change in meaning and the bubble technological push where there is radical change in technology.
In this yellow part where there is a radical change in meaning but not in technology we find designs like alessi’s corkscrew.
In this blue section we find technologies like the first mp3 player, which was a significant technological upgrade from portable cassette and cd players.
Now in this green part we find the iPod.
[slide eight]
This is green part is what Verganti refers to as a technological epiphany.
[slide nine]
My PhD is in collaboration with the National Trust property Seaton Delaval Hall. This property wishes to create an oral history archive and the reason that I started this presentation by talking about the now obsolete iPod is because just like Apple did in 2001 I would also like to achieve a
[slide ten]
technological epiphany.
[slide eleven]
Presently archives are very busy digitising their collections which is great especially during the pandemic.
[slide twelve]
However this push to digitise fall very much in the blue technological push category. Everyone else is online so archives better move there too. The result of this however is websites that look like this.
[slide thirteen]
Not particularly sexy or even that helpful.
[slide fourteen]
What I want to do with my project is actually stop and think about how this technology could actually change the meaning of archiving.
[slide fifteen]
Venganti describes the many ways one can achieve this but it all boils down to doing a lot of talking across disciplines.
[slide sixteen]
How would a graphic designer redesign this page? How does the PhD student feel when they are in an archive? How would an environmentalist make a sustainable archive? How do game designers handle information? Many questions, a lot of information and hopefully a change in what it means to archive.