Bill Moggridge, designer of the first laptop, co-founder of IDEO (@ideo), and director of the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, talks with Fast Company's Co.Design (@fastcodesign) about the leading thinkers he spoke with for his new book, Designing Media.
Moggridge takes the troubled world of media, both old and new, and looks at it as a series of design problems. How do you design news as a social platform? Or newspapers at a time when everyone’s reading websites? Yet, he says paper is not going away:
It's all to do with the nature of the experience. I think of electronic books and online book content as being good news for book designers. Because what it means is: If you just want the content in a text form, then why would you ever buy a physical book, because you can read it so successfully on an e-reader. However, if you want to enjoy a book, you buy it because it's beautifully designed -- the paper is wonderful, the color is delicious, you can smell it, you can thumb through it, you can pick it up and feel heft the way you can’t with an e-reader. So if you’re going to stick with the physical book, then let's make sure the design of the physical book really engages you and makes you want to luxuriate in it.
You'll want to read this extensive interview and watch the videos.