Shake the book you're reading
Shake the book you're reading
What we can learn from children's books about designing experiences
👋 Hi friends, it's Hesam with issue #27 of 4 bits. 4 bits is a biweekly newsletter where I share thoughts and musings on how to build memorable experiences.
A quick update:
✨ I’ve been having a blast building out a new course called Intro to Design and Innovation. For undergraduate students at Rice, this course involves a human-centered design project where they explore what matters to Rice students, a no-code project where teams create 2 apps in 4 weeks, and a momentum project where they select one of their previous concepts to test further during the final weeks of the course.
🎉 This week, the teams had their demo day, where they showcased their apps to each other. Many of the apps were powered by AI and built rather quickly by people who had zero software experience.
🏃🏽♂️➡️ It brought back memories to 10+ years ago when I taught a mobile application development course at University of Houston. Back then, we would take 3 months to build a simple app. Now we’re able to do it in a less than 2 weeks. The pace of technology is mind-boggling sometimes.
Shake the book you’re reading
I'm sitting on the floor watching my 5 year old furiously shake a book as if she’s a bartender making a craft cocktail.
She turns a page. Colorful circles have flown across the page.
She claps once. She turns the page again. The circles are bigger now.
"Woah." She exclaims.
She claps twice. She turns the page one more time. The circles have tripled in size.
She smiles and starts giggling.
Meanwhile, I’m watching this unfold. The book she's reading is Press Here, the longest running picture book on the New York Times bestseller list.
With each page turn, she’s given another set of instructions to follow. She happily obliges. She’s rewarded with a change in the colorful circles. They get bigger and smaller. They multiply. They move from side of the book to another.
Each page steps her further into an imaginary experience. A conversation between her and the book is happening in real time, and she’s fully immersed.
What if a book was more than a book?
When I was a kid, I was a fan of Choose Your Own Adventure books. As a reader, you take on a role as a character in the story. Page after page, you are faced with choices to make. Do you turn right or left? Do you talk to the wizard or the rabbit?
You flip to a different page number based on your choice. Wizard, page 35. Rabbit, page 82. The story changes with each page flip and there are multiple endings. Each person’s path is unique.
What makes both Press Here and Choose Your Own Adventure special is that they change the relationship between the book and the reader. You aren’t flipping page after page anymore. Instead, your role as reader changes from passive reader to active participant. Your actions impact what happens next.
I often wonder how we can take what’s expected from an experience and completely turn it upside down.
Books are for reading from start to finish, page after page.
The author is talking at you but not with you.
But what if we didn’t follow those rules?
My cocktail shaking daughter has me thinking about how we can push the boundaries of what’s expected and design an experience that delights a person in a different and unusual way.
your ability to observe and find meaning in something that most people would overlook, like watching your daughter shake a book, and then crafting an entire post about the insights you gained from that moment, is truly remarkable 🙌