Kari Kraus and Students Co-Author Article

Professor Kari Kraus and five students from her Fall 2012 grad seminar "Book 2.0: The History of the Book and the Future of Reading" authored an article, "Bibliocircuitry and the Design of the Alien Everyday,"

Most of the students opted to do final projects rather than papers for the seminar, which included several hybrid print-electronic artists' books (print books with embedded microcontrollers, which I introduced the students to in a workshop). The article showcases some of these projects and theoretically contextualizes them.

Kari's five co-authors are Cameron Mozafari, Carlea Holl-Jensen, Clifford Hichar, Charity Hancock, and Kathryn Skutlin.

Below is an abstract:

"Bibliocircuitry and the Design of the Alien Everyday"

This essay describes, models, and advocates for the role of reflective design in bibliography and textual studies. Popularized by Donald Norman, reflective design promotes critical inquiry over usability and exploratory prototyping over fully realized productions. We highlight four projects undertaken by the authors that embody reflective design, including three that explore the crossed codes of print and electronic books. A larger aim of the essay is to position bibliotextual scholarship and pedagogy as design-oriented practices that can be used to imagine the future as well as reconstruct the past.