(KR Information Design Lab The Tablet Newspaper: A vision for the Future © Copyright 1994 Knight-Ridder, Inc) [Printing noise]
[Off voice, female] For more than 500 years, ink printed on paper has been the best medium
for delivering written information.
But as the world becomes increasingly digital, all that is changing.
Here, at the Knight-Ridder information design lab in Boulder, Colorado,
a team of journalists, designers, technologists and researchers
is putting together the tools that will take today's newspaper into the electronic age.
[Roger Fiddler] We will have the interactive graphic now.
So, when you click on the graphical animate on the front page, or you click on the story (?)
[off voice] Roger Fiddler established the lab for Knight-Ridder in the Fall of 1992.
Today, he serves as its director.
[Fiddler] All human communication systems are undergoing a transformation --
from one form to another.
And that's all being brought about by emergent technologies and by cultural changes.
Now, several years ago, I coined the word "mediamorphosis" to describe this transformation.
Newspapers are certainly going through that now,
but all forms of media that we know today will be transformed over the next 10, 15 years.
[off voice, male] The transforming inventions are of course the computer and digital telecommunications,
We're finding that our capacity to be able to process and deliver information
through information superhighways and computer systems,
are increasing in efficiency and they're resulting in reduced costs for publishing.
I do believe that for the first time, we're going to begin seeing an alternative to ink on paper.
It may be difficult to conceptualize, the idea of digital paper,
but in fact, we believe that that's what's going to happen.
[Fiddler] Ideal is (? 1:54) is a media think-tank:
we bring people to the lab to give us more insights into the developments of technologies
and particularly, digital technologies and digital communication.
Our role is to investigate the opportunities that may be there for newspaper companies
over the next few years
and to also try to develop a long-range vision of where the newspaper industry is headed
over the next 5, 10, 20 years.
[Off voice, female] An important part of this evolution is the emergence of the electronic tablet.
This device is under development at consumer electronic companies around the world.
Tablets will be a whole new class of computers.
They'll weigh under two pounds.
They'll be totally portable.
They'll have a clarity of screen display comparable to ink on paper.
They'll be able to blend text, video, audio and graphics together.
And they'll be part of our daily lives around the turn of this century.
We may still use computers to create information,
but we'll use the tablet to interact with information: reading, watching, listening.
[Fiddler] Our goal here, at the Information Design Lab,
is to develop the appropriate interfaces and appropriate technologies,
so that when we actually do produce electronic editions of newspapers for these tablets,
that we could hand it to you and you would immediately know how to use the .....
because it looks familiar to you.
In fact, what we are doing is building a bridge of familiarity.
When we talk about human communication systems, what we discover throughout history
is that they have evolved and new forms tend to take on many of the characteristics of older forms
for some period of time.
Over time, of course, they do evolve and take on their own characteristics.
I believe the same thing will happen in our transition
from ink on paper to digital forms of newspapers and magazines and books.
But in the beginning, they will retain many of the familiar characteristics of print products today.
And I think that's absolutely essential.
We don't want to have to issue people manuals to read their newspaper.
You already know how to read a newspaper, you know how to turn pages, pull out a section,
find things that are interesting to you.
We can enhance that with electronic technology and make it much more useful
and add value to it.
But we believe we have to build a bridge of familiarity first,
to get us from the ink on paper product into the digital world. (4:28)