This Week’s Insights: Treating audience as a design issue… Encouraging audience behavior by rewarding it… How museums are using 3D-printing… Working on making opera more accessible… The Netflix of books.
- Audience As A Design Issue: In the age of mass production, designers designed for the average user, a generic one-size-fits-all approach. Of course we all know there’s no such thing, and sizing that didn’t quite fit was okay for most users. Standard. But there were always people who would be “designed out” by generic sizes because those sizes didn’t work for them. Short people who can’t reach shelves, people in wheel chairs who can’t navigate stairs. Generic design excludes people and labels them as disabled or handicapped from the norm. But what if it’s just our approach to design that’s at fault?
- If You Want To Encourage Behavior, Reward It: That’s what the Dutch Rail service does during its National Book Week. There’s a free book, and on Sunday, simply show the book on the train and you ride for free. No, it doesn’t guarantee that you’re reading it, but at least it puts the focus on books, and it is a collective declaration that books are important.
- How Museums Are Using 3D Replicas: We have reverence for the original. And that’s what museums sell, is the ability to be in the presence of those originals. But people like to touch, which of course is not possible in most cases. So how to scratch the itch? 3D-printed replicas. “Being able to touch, explore the shape, feel the weight and even smell the replica of an artefact has the potential to transform cultural heritage experiences. In reality, these connections are the closest that most people could ever have with heritage objects.”
- How To Make Opera More Accessible? Maybe lower ticket prices?Different performance times? Different rituals? The English National Opera is experimenting. The London company has held its highest ticket price at £125 and cut its lowest to £10 and is expanding its free-balcony-seats-for-under-18s from Saturdays to Fridays and opening nights. In addition, the company will offer its first-ever relaxed performance (with accommodation for learning-disabled and autistic attendees), and at least one performance in each run of an opera will end by 10 pm.
- The Uber Of This, The Netflix Of That. Now Books: Will people read more if they have unfettered access to millions of books? Scribd, a subscription service for e-books and audiobooks with over 1 million paying subscribers, is launching Scribd Originals, which will “focus on ‘the space between a magazine article and a book’ — namely, pieces up to 50,000 words in length that are too long to run in a magazine but aren’t long enough to be published as a standalone book.”
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