We’re very excited here at Portigal Consulting to announce the start of a new self-funded project–Reading Ahead.

In Reading Ahead, we’ll be exploring the evolution of reading and books from a consumer perspective–what it means to be a reader, how artifacts from traditional books to devices like Amazon’s Kindle affect the experience, and what the future might hold for readers, product developers, and beyond.

Over the course of the project, we’ll be blogging both about how we work and what we see and learn.

Steve Portigal (left) and Dan Soltzberg, project kickoff, July 27, 2009

Understanding our client
One of the first steps in any project is figuring out what the project is really about. So the first piece of research we do is often focused on our client.

As we work with our clients to establish the scope and approach of a project, we also interview key stakeholders in their organization to better understand what they know and what they need to know. (This doesn’t always map to what they think they know and what they think they need to know, and it’s important to suss out the differences.) These interviews help us understand the dynamics of the team and the organizational culture.

In this case, we’re our own client, so we sat down and asked each other some fundamental questions

• What is it we want to know that we don’t know now?
  
• What are we going to do with what we learn?
  
• What are the people, places, things, behaviors, etc. that we think we want to focus on.
  
• How broadly or tightly do we want to draw the scope of the exploration (at least at the outset—this can change as the project moves forward). In this case, to what extent might we want to be looking at bigger categories like content, entertainment, free time?

The way we answer these project definition questions will have a huge affect on how the work unfolds. As in most projects, we’ll be looking for the sweet spot that is constrained enough to give the project a clear focus but open enough to leave room for the unexpected.

Tags: amazon, behavior, books, client services, consulting, design, design research, ethnography, Kindle, project, reading, Reading Ahead, research

11 Responses to “Reading Ahead: Project Launch”

Will you be dividing books into subsets? by genres
like cookbooks or textbooks // by size //
by age 15thC, 19thC? // by reader situation–
private, public, silent, outloud // by culture
of the maker of the book? // by cost? Will you
be looking for the aids that make reading easier?
–intrigued, i’ll stay tuned, — mkj (a rare book librarian)

Comment by Mary Kay Johnsen 07.29.09 @ 12:51 pm





Hi Steve, what an exciting project!

From my own experience as an author I have started redefining readers as people who may also be very active in the creation and follow-up of the book.

The book I am currently writing is co-created with 450+ people who participated in becoming readers & contributors (not always) before the book is actually produced (and they paid to join)…

I believe in many cases the reader may become a much more participatory actor in the future… adding to a book, commenting, etc.

Good luck with the project,
Alex

Comment by Alexander Osterwalder 07.30.09 @ 1:17 am





Hi Mary,

You raise a good point, that there are lots of different types of reading and books. I think the contrast of social/interpersonal reading–parents and kids, etc.–with reading as a private activity is especially intriguing. This project has a fairly small scope, so we won’t be dividing things up in any kind of formal way, but we’ll definitely be looking at multiple aspects of our participants’ reading lives.

Comment by Dan Soltzberg 07.30.09 @ 9:07 pm





Alex,

Thanks so much for sharing your comments. It’s definitely true that there are many ways in which reader/writer can overlap–fan fiction, etc.–and the collaborative way you’re writing your book sounds fascinating.

Comment by Dan Soltzberg 07.30.09 @ 9:18 pm





I am the leader of the Save the Donnell Library movement in NYC. McKinsey recommended a one library program to the NYPL, make the main library and international destination and the branches be damned. THey would have sold off two more if the economy was better. We believe in branches in the neighborhoods and the restoration of a regional library-which is what the Donnell was, rich in resources for the general reader, the researcher, had the best World Languages Collection the best audio visual collection with a renown old film vault, entertainment weekly in their auditorium, a “teen room” always overflowing, free computer access for the neighborhood, on and on. So evidence of the evolution of reading would be of interest to us.

Comment by RitaSUe Siegel 07.31.09 @ 2:47 pm





RitaSue – we’ll be sharing what we find here (and probably making arrangements with people to give a more in-depth download where appropriate, too). You point out yet another fork that we’re unlikely to be able to explore in this first phase – the role of libraries and public institutions in “reading”

Comment by Steve Portigal 08.01.09 @ 9:13 am





RitaSue,

You raise the point that libraries are about so much more than just the act of reading.

Comment by Dan Soltzberg 08.01.09 @ 9:13 am





i’m really looking forward to learning from this important investigation!

Comment by Denise Lee Yohn 08.02.09 @ 9:45 am





So where did you establish/capture the goals of this research project? I could not find this in the writeup.

Comment by Anthony 08.17.09 @ 6:56 am





Anthony, our goals for the project are in the 2nd paragraph of the post:

“In Reading Ahead, we’ll be exploring the evolution of reading and books from a consumer perspective–what it means to be a reader, how artifacts from traditional books to devices like Amazon’s Kindle affect the experience, and what the future might hold for readers, product developers, and beyond.”

It’s an exploratory study, so we didn’t begin the project with specific design objectives or anything of that nature.

Comment by Dan Soltzberg 08.17.09 @ 4:04 pm




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