Old books: further development

I’m really quite warming to this Treasure Island idea… I feel it’s more of a “goer” than what I’ve been talking about in earlier posts. I hope that its combination of fiction and historical details makes it a stimulating and worthwhile experience of a doco. By making it an online piece, hopefully I’ll be tapping into and interacting with a new audience – and hey, if they have a technology addiction then maybe this’ll provide a distraction from their online time-wasting… “A successful novel should interrupt the reader’s life, make him or her miss appointments, skip meals, forget to walk the dog. In the best novels, the writer’s imagination becomes the reader’s reality.” – Stephen King, cited here.

As “research”, I decided to call my Granma this afternoon. After a good ol’ chat about adventure books and how girls’ boarding schools were portrayed and illustrated fairy novels, she told me about some of her key memories from childhood. They used to play a lot of hopscotch, with complex rules with balls and things. She tended a ‘Victory Garden’ – personal vegetable patches to help the war effort. She also made felt brooches for the war, and had to save every skerrick of silver paper, which wrapped lollies and things. Children liked to collect things, like stamps and bottle caps. Isn’t that sweet? I’m not suggesting we necessarily start to live like this, but I think it’s important to preserve and learn about personal history.

Before I can really start to develop UX and UI design I need to figure out my target audience. You know what, I think I’m going to go with a fairly broad spectrum, not so much children as young adults perhaps – people like me I guess, who like reading and could share the site with older relatives (who ideally would be able to pick up the computing skills and then find other benefits of being online). I’ve decided against making a site for young children for now, because I want to preserve the aesthetic of the old books and curiosities from the 1930s, and I feel that their appeal is more suited to a slightly older audience. Ideally, most people (including middle age adults as well) will be able to find benefit – afterall, we were all children once!

Further “research” today – I scrounged around a bit in the garage to try and find any more old books from the McClintocks, and came up with some amazing items! Particularly noteworthy was Webster’s Popular Illustrated Dictionary from 1933, which included a handful of photos, newspaper clippings, a letter etc tucked in certain pages. It was an adventure!

I told my mother about what I was doing, and she found an amazing book for me in the cabinet. It’s a 1913 edition of Ethel C. Pedley’s Dot and the Kangaroo, originally owned by my Great Aunt Dot who first read it in 1918 and gave it to me in 1992. It’s really wonderful.

Its dedication reads:

TO THE
CHILDREN OF AUSTRALIA,
IN THE HOPE OF
ENLISTING THEIR SYMPATHIES FOR THE MANY
BEAUTIFUL, AMIABLE, AND FROLICSOME
CREATURES OF THEIR LAND;
WHOSE EXTINCTION, THROUGH RUTHLESS
DESTRUCTION, IS BEING SURELY
ACCOMPLISHED

I would love to make an online documentary about this, with all sorts of links about Australian animals and modern day conservation issues. I think if I were to choose this book, it would be more child-orientated… but unfortunately I can’t remember much about the story. So perhaps, if this project went large scale, I would do other sections in the website about different books like this. But for the purpose of this assignment, I think I’m going to stick with Treasure Island because of Bernie’s drawings and the richness of pirate imagery (a treasure map could be a really great interface) and the era he’s from. Stay tuned for more info about design aspects!

Old books – the new adventure

(I’ve decided to scrap the serious alternate reality game thing – I really wouldn’t be able to make such a thing and none of the ideas were really shining for it anyway.)

So: Completely new idea!

Something that came up in my other research was that some old things, past-times, stories etc are being lost to new generations of children because of technological developments – but there’s no point in trying to fight this, I’ve decided we should work on ways to embrace the ways people use the Internet etc, possibly in order to revive these wonderful old things.

Earlier this year I discovered and read a really old book in a box at my parents’ house – it’s Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Treasure Island”, owned by a schoolboy in 1936. His name was Bernie McClintock, and was the husband of a lady I used to know when I was young. I really loved reading this book because of its age and because of all the scrawling little drawings and notes Bernie made.

I’d like to use the book as a starting point (and possible navigation tool) for a website with a potential range of functions: firstly, to re-introduce old books and history to children, to open up the Internet and its possibilities for the elderly, and to inspire appreciation and dialogue between grandchildren and grandparents. Brainstorming, a site based on the book could:
-help children discover the Treasure Island world of pirates etc, re-invigorate the story for a new audience
-follow the fictional story with links to other stories and historical backgrounds of the work (like Re-Enchantment)
-help children discover the life of school boys in the 1930s
-be used as a connection method between generations  (could I make a site they could navigate together?)
-be a portal for old people to rediscover and remember their childhood. I remember reading somewhere that the Internet has become a great medium for the elderly- it provides access for so many things that have been lost to them for decades (songs, historical items and icons, snippets of media, etc) as well as providing social connectedness (here’s a psychological study ‘Using the Internet to improve the wellbeing of the elderly’)
-close the generational digital divide? It’d be lovely to make a site that acts as a catalyst for grandchildren to be curious about their relatives’ childhoods – I know that when I watched the Up series I became a whole lot more curious about my parents’ earlier lives (as they’re the same age as the series’ participants)

So, I guess the product I would be making would be an augmented eBook / interactive kind of digital archive, preserving and providing access for life before our modern day gadgets. At the moment I’m thinking of using the book as the main navigation somehow, possibly animating Bernie’s little drawings, and providing links to other information about childhood in the 1930s, such as school life, home life, contemporary music, games (see previous post), photos, the local and historical context, and personal stories. There’d also be more information about the book’s story and relevance, other versions of the work (looking up Treasure Island on Wikipedia shows heaps of  film and stage adaptions), interesting words and concepts that arise from the book, etc.

Some questions and initial areas which I’ll need to work out:
-How will I distinguish between the era the book is about, the era in which the book was written and the era in which it was read and decorated by Bernie? Is this getting too complicated?
-For a larger scale project, should I include other books with histories imbrued in them? (different classic children’s books, read in different eras…)
-Is it possible to make a site that is designed appropriately for both the elderly and the young? Simple layout, easy navigation, large text etc are fine strategies, but will there be a style that is suitable for both? And if not, which is the main audience I should choose?