be used all day without removing it when it’s not being used,” concluded the students.
Less visual and slightly less sci-fi is the
idea of ‘magazine’ not as a single brand but as a digital assistant à la Apple’s Siri.
This team of students wanted a service
that would give readers the content they want, at the moment they want it, from a vast digital library of magazines. Based on a combination of the reader’s reading history, verbal instructions from the reader, and the Kinect mood recognition system, the ‘Magi’ (‘magazine intelligence’) would deliver the right content at the right time
This new idea of the ‘magazine’ experience
would also be able to interact with readers, asking ‘intelligent’ questions and answering readers’ queries as they go through the stories (e.g. “Hey, Magi, what’s the history behind this politician’s position change?” or “Magi, where can I buy this dress?”)
Let’s close with a much less sexy idea,
but one that magazine publishers and/ or distributors could create… tomorrow.
This student team called their project
‘MagZone’. They made it real in their project video which opened with a narrator
in a doctor’s office waiting room showing a table littered with a pile of dog-eared, out-of-date magazines and the only good publication in someone else’s hands.
This team wanted to create MagZones
where a server would make a wide array of magazines available to anyone in ‘the zone’ for free. Using NFC (Near Field Communication), readers could get their favourite magazine downloaded to their mobile device. But if they wanted to keep reading after they’d left the doctor’s office or airline lounge, they’d have to purchase it. A technology called ‘geo-fencing’ allows readers access to the story/magazine while they’re within the MagZone and gives them the option to purchase it before they leave.
Prof. Pargman said that some magazine industry executives in the audience at the final project presentations were licking their chops at the MagZone idea.
Will we see these ideas anytime
soon? Will we ever see them? It almost doesn’t matter because just by raising possibilities and discussing radical, paradigm-challenging ideas, the industry is being given the keys to its future. Smart magazine executives might do well to take the Royal Institute students to lunch.