Connecting the digital world with print

I am a designer and express my ideas through product development and built experiences, not writing. So, it's unusual for me to be doing this, but I have a desire to see if I can convince you of my belief in a potential for a future for print. First, I would like to explain a more general idea and lead on to why I think publishers could be the key.

Why fluidity of use turns processes into product

Interaction in the physical world changes as it becomes fluid. If hurdles are removed, interaction becomes invisible – it disappears from your conscious mind and your train of thought is not broken; you concentrate on the purpose and not the process. You don't have to think about doing the action.

Eventually the physical object becomes what it does and in our minds you no longer see it as a set of mechanisms. It simply becomes its purpose. For example, each of these was a complex physical system that has now become almost invisible to use:

• Speaking your language, reading text and counting.
• Using coins, or a knife, making tea or navigating a kitchen.
• Driving a car, using a mouse or accessing Google.

I see the process as working like this:

• You have to be able to see the potential of something in order to act on it.
• When you do act on it, what you get must be worth the effort of the activity needed in getting it.
• The way of getting to something should become quicker with practice.

When you no longer have to think about how you get to something then the objects become what it does – it becomes part of our physical language. Sometimes we will accept awkward interfaces if it's the only way to get to things we really want. TV remotes are an example of this, as is texting on a numerical keypad. These are often temporary and get replaced. I doubt that my son will ever bother to learn T9 texting.

Experiments with physical language

20 years ago I left the subject I trained in, Product Design, a profession which I learned all-too-often to mean the design of consumer experiences: a type of technical, stylised, packaging and marketing. The subject I moved into was the design and exploration of what new digital products might do. This, for me, has centred on the connection between the physical and the digital world.

In the early 1990s, one aspect of this was to explore a simple idea. What if there was a generic tool to link the digital and the physical worlds? A way to touch an object, to select and see its digital augmentation? It would just send a message via your chosen device: laptop, mobile, home wifi et al. The equivalent of a digital finger. Passive objects would act as physical buttons to the digital world. All that these objects would require is that we perceive their purpose, and see how to act on them. We would need to have an accessible tool to make our selection, and carry out the link between the two worlds.

In principle, we are quite used to this. A light switch at the entrance to a room is a convenient place to put a command for a light. If the switch operated like the host of wireless doorbells which you can buy at Argos, then it does not need to be wired. I would also expect the switch to come with the light: after all, it is really part of the light, a split object. Hopefully, it could then do a better job of describing what light it would produce!

It is not a great leap from a wireless doorbell to imagining carrying a similar device, but replacing the button with a barcode reader. Instead of pressing the button, it reads a bar-coded action and sends it off to the network. The light switch at the entrance to the room would only need to hold a printed code, a shortcut, a URL, and a tag to its action. It could be as beautiful or ugly as your taste in light fittings.

Since 1992 I have had the opportunity to explore, design and build many approaches to this - from RFIDs, touch IDs (you sometimes see these on pub tills to identify bartenders), spatial readers (like kids' LeapPads) to printed codes (like Barcodes and QR codes). I still believe that, at some point, we may live in a society where most objects are visibly augmented with digital information; where objects are direct access to sites, services, sounds, applications and actions.

What has this to do with print, books, and publishers?

The most common way of describing potential in our society and understanding how to do things is via physical text: books, papers, posters, magazines, post, notebooks, signage, menus, maps... but also the labels on the buttons in cars, TV remotes and the controls on products. Print is one of the most normal interfaces to the computer - from the letters printed on the keys I am typing with, to the debit card I have in my wallet, or the barcodes on every piece of packaging and the books that we buy.

The simplest objects to augment are those that are already going to be printed, where their content is either about other media, or simply has a broader context. If you take the example of books, it is easy to think about how the author might augment books on film and TV; educational books; language books; music books; and reference books. It is easy to imagine a Doctor Who annual linked to clips from the series, or the Readers Digest DIY manual linking to numerous online video examples and relevant local information.

Doesn't it already exist with printed URLs?

Authors often print links to websites in their publications. It is very useful, and occasionally I can be bothered to type them in. It is totally limited by the process of having to enter them. To be honest, even if I could speak them in, it would still be clunky.

What about the barcodes on products?

The development of physical objects connected to digital data is amazing: ISBN (books), UPC (product) barcodes, and on manufacturing lines. However, these barcodes are in closed systems and are used to identify objects.They do not help the general-purpose augmentation of objects.

What about RFID?

RFID has a great use, particularly where security is important. But, it cannot compete with print as a simple way to implement the connecting the physical to the digital world. RFID is expensive when compared with printed codes, which are usually free when adding to printed media, and is an extra process, invisible, and difficult to select when tags are grouped together.

Hasn't augmentation already been done with QR codes?

QR might be the closest to a general system, and I have nothing against the format of the actual printed QR code. Unfortunately, what QR really means is defined by hardware: smartphone camera-based readers. It is not a fluid process, and sadly the content is often not worthwhile. Even if I ignore the issues of turning the phone on and launching an app, it still requires aiming a phone at the code from a distance, so that it's in focus. This is clunky, and physically limits the types of content that you would use it with. For all that effort, the content will often be advertising anyway. For an everyday system, it is not even worth discussing the lack of fluidity of interaction using QR codes via the webcam on a laptop computer.

How could a generic reader become an everyday tool?

There is a chicken-and-egg problem. There is no point in making readers if there is nothing for them to read, and vice versa. QR codes have got around this by piggybacking onto smartphone cameras, and the ease of adding the reading apps to the phone. Unfortunately, this hardware is also the problem. Perhaps QR codes could work if a smartphone manufacturer were to come out with a pointable reader on their phones, where you could accurately touch it on a page to select a small printed code. It would not be difficult to use a phone like this as a tool: a flexible input device, sending the selected code to a local iPad, laptop or console, but I will not hold my breath waiting for a large manufacturer to change how we connect print to media.

Another route might be to introduce a reader into homes attached to a group of publications. This has some potential. I have enough experience to think that it is feasible to manufacture a simple USB pen-sized printed code reader in volume for about £1. If a publisher was to print codes in a set of well-chosen suitable publications and offer the reader as an option when buying the book, perhaps they could kickstart an industry. It needs to be implemented openly and with care to avoid the pitfalls of products like the CueCat.

If people find USB augmentation useful and publications are appearing with codes in them, then we have the chicken... or is it the egg? There will then be a market for flexible, and better, readers. With these, you could switch between using them in conjunction with a smartphone, tablet, laptop, or a desktop computer.

What of the future?

If the readers are established, then manufacturers in other markets are likely to piggyback on them, offering guides to TV sets and games consoles; printed music collections to audio players; and, even possibly, using the instructions for domestic appliances and white goods as remotes for their operation.

Durrell Bishop is the co-founder of Luckybite.