When thinking about new technology, I find it extremely helpful to look to the past to see hints on where we can go in the future.
Johann Gutenberg’s printing press from the mid-fifteenth century is arguably the most important innovation since the wheel. While earlier texts, such as the Diamond Sutra, had been printed in China and Korea, Gutenberg’s was the first to feature movable type. Metal slugs for each character were layed out on a surface. Ink was pressed over them and a press applied paper to it to make a copy of the text. While it seems simple today, this innovation dented the planet. Very little of Western society was left unchanged.
However, what’s interesting is that his press featured relatively little brand new components. For the most part, he took existing tools that existed in a variety of “disciplines” and combined them in a new way. For instance, Gutenberg took screw presses, which had been used in winemaking since the first century, to press paper against the inked type. A cursory study of significant innovations will show that this pattern is not unique. Almost all innovations spring from this combination of components usually not combined. As an aside, that’s one of the exciting things about AIMS, we work across the traditional boundaries of different disciplines and, hopefully, real innovation occurs!
Early printed books from the first generation or so of printing presses are known as the “incunabula”, Latin for “swaddling clothes”. They have a handful of remarkable features. Looking at them, one really gets the feel that the printers had yet to realize the benefits of this new medium. As communication theorist Marshall McLuhan wrote, “The student of media soon comes to expect the new media of any period whatever to be classed as pseudo by those who have acquired the patterns of earlier media, whatever they may happen to be.”
We see this reliance on the earlier media all over the incunabula. The first is that while Gutenberg’s innovation automated the once laborious hand-copying of the text of books, incunabula were still illuminated by hand by artists so that they looked more like the previous medium. So, in these early books, only the type was printed. The rest of the illustrations and decorative flourishes were done by hand. An example is in figure 1.
Fig. 1. Pico Master, Death of Eli, King Saul enthroned, and floral and gold-dot borders, in Biblia italica. Venice: Vindelinus de Spira, 1 August 1471, opening to 1 Kings (1 Samuel) Zurich, Zentralbibliothek, Sig. 2.6, fol. 119).
It wasn’t until much later that wood prints were added into the process. Again, while wood prints had existed before, adding them to Gutenberg’s printing press process was a major innovation. See Fig. 2 for an example.
Fig 2. Pico Master design, woodcut of Vision of Ezekiel, in Biblia Latina cum postillis Nicholai De Lyra. Venice: [Bonetus Locatellus] for Octavianus Scotus, 8 August 1489, Commentary on Exekiel 1 (Citta del Vaticano, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Inc. Prop. II, 176, fol LL5′).
What is interesting to me in this is that the McLuhan quote is still relevant. Even though the wood prints greatly increased the speed of reproduction, they still seem like “pseudo” versions of the hand-painted illustrations. It isn’t until a few more decades before we see the benefit of the precision of the woodcuts over hand-drawn illustrations. Prior to the printing press, any scientific texts were exceedingly dense with few or no illustrations. It isn’t until the advent of the woodcuts do we start to see precise illustrations embedded within the texts (see figure 3).
Fig 3. Detail from Nicolaus Cusanus, Opuscula. (Strassburg)
It is hard to imagine Galileo’s Starry Messenger being as convincing as it was without his detailed illustrations of the moon (fig 4) or his observations of the position of Jupiter’s moon orbiting the planet (fig. 5).
Fig 4. Galileo’s sketches of the moon from Starry Messenger, http://www.rarebookroom.org/Control/galsid/index.html
Fig 5. Galileo’s illustration of Jupiter’s moons orbiting Jupiter from Starry Messenger, http://www.rarebookroom.org/Control/galsid/index.html
You’ll also note from the figures that none of these incunabula contain any sort of navigational system. There is no table of contents. There is no index. There are not even page numbers! It wasn’t until decades after Gutenberg that the printer G. Lauser in Rome actually numbered the pages of the text for the first time (Wellisch, Hans H. “Incunabula indexes.” The Indexer Vol 19 No. 1 April 1994: 6).
As an interaction designer, I think, in many ways, we’re in the midst of a digital incunabula. Much like these early printers, we have yet to really figure out all the innovations that will make up the “standard” aesthetics and navigational tools of interactivity. While we have tools and systems in place to speed up this process of understanding the power of the new medium (tools like UX research and the like that we cover in our courses). However, it will take time, cross-disciplinary work and a willingness to move beyond existing ways of doing things to discover the the real power behind interactive systems and objects.