work

This project was a response a university brief that called to investigate a self-led and experiment-based project to answer a crafted research question within the field of media design. Through this, an exploration was conducted on how music can be transformed into a broader sensory experience through book design. The exploration centred itself through emotional and multi-sensory design practices to encourage richer, more meaningful user experiences, particularly by pushing the boundaries of tactile experience in physical book design and cultivating it as a meaningful rather than purely functional compositional element.

Through this, a hi-fi prototype was produced, creating an outcome that transforms the song “Don’t Leave Too Soon” by Little Simz into a tactile and visual experience through the means of personal interpretation, to facilitate an enhanced emotional and sonic journey and encourage a deeper understanding of the song itself.

Problem

How might book design be used to capture a multi-sensory and emotional design experience that explores how a song can be transformed into a wider sensory journey?

Approach

Throughout this project, emotional design methodology was utilised, along with analogue techniques, to create a successful crossover between tactile and visual experiences in a multi-sensory book to craft the song ‘Don’t Leave Too Soon’ by Little Simz into a physical experience. This was investigated through a series of four key experiments exploring material selection, manipulation and binding techniques to produce a final book artefact.

The core emotions of the song were identified and used to investigate correlating materials, which were tested to understand music-material correlation. Page design was then explored deeply to understand how pages can effectively convey meaning through their structural form, rather than merely serving as a functional carrier for print: Lace was selected to represent themes of hope and care, along with the soft string sections of the song, while aluminium was explored to portray the hard jungle beat and themes of struggle and pain, while paper was utilised to create meaning through textures and visuals via material manipulation.

Output

A cohesive book design was crafted as the final output, where a series of page designs were developed, focusing on utilising a limited set of materials and colours to help to ensure that different page designs were coherent, while offering a breadth of visual and tactile experiences to enhance user engagement in the absence of printed graphics.

This was done by utilising aluminium (in two forms: sheet metal and foil), paper, white lace, and a white transparent plastic material, creating a colour palette of white and silver to illustrate the raw emotion of the song, while utilising different techniques to manipulate the materials, along with including written material, to create a variety of touch and visual-based experiences.

Outcome

The process of this project highlighted the complexity of music and demonstrated how a single song can carry a range of emotions and concepts that require deep exploration to convey.

The final book design successfully demonstrates that music can be conveyed through textile materials to produce a visual and tactile translation that creates a richer, more meaningful and emotive experience for users, however the translation is highly subjective and complex, which crafts an impressionistic rather than objective lens for the project.