Today we fully immersed ourselves in the ideation process by formalising an initial concept and discussing how we might best visualise our ideas. The central concept expands on the conclusions of yesterday’s workshop – that we don’t want to replace the book in its current form(s), but rather we wish to develop some kind of system for augmenting the book. The idea being that this system/architecture would connect many ‘containers’ of knowledge (print books, eReaders, journals, etc.) and enable different devices and applications to be integrated in order to deliver a whole raft of multiplatform/multimedia/multisensory features that can support learning, engagement and comprehension.

Our research and discussions throughout the workshop have suggested a range of core functionalities and requirements for academics in the 21st century:

• Social/communal – allowing users to discuss, analyse, critique and exchange related/supporting/contrary research 
• Personalised and customisable learning experience
• Providing information about the impact, citations and relevance of the book (and its contents)
• Providing key-words, overviews and additional information about the content, authors, suggested readings, etc.
• Ability to tag, categorise, archive
• Suggest and augment books with additional related audio-visual content
• Support learning difficulties and learning styles

In addition to this central concept (an integrated learning ecosystem), we started to brainstorm the various applications and interactive surfaces/screens that could connect to this system. One of these is a development of the IKEA interactive kitchen table and IDEO Future Book concepts that we had discovered earlier in the week (and which generated lots of fruitful discussion/inspiration for our designs). Whilst these concepts are fairly confined to one device, we are interested in the ways in which different devices can be integrated together to enhance and augment the learner experience. In the afternoon we began to design a version of this interactive table concept, we developed storyboards for our concept visualisations, and we shot some test footage.