Binder
Shruti Ashok
In today’s world, there are many ways that we can read a paragraph of information. We have applications that function as e-readers, and bookshelves, but there is no way to customize your reading experience. Binder is a project that proposes new and intelligent ways to interact with text, literary works, and bodies of information. It is an interactive e-reader for self-selected content.
It provides an interface that consolidates material from different sources and different formats like PDFs, articles, newspapers, books, e-books, and scholarly websites into one “binder.” It is a shelf that plays host to your required reading material, as well as your notebook, journal, sketches, or notes section. It allows you, as the user to make decisions about type, color, text size and scrolling speed. Using easy to access tools from the toolbar a user can switch to night mode, track their reading speed, record a lecture, have the binder read aloud to them, highlight, look up a definition of a word, switch over to the notebook section, type out a summary, and even scribble doodles in the margins.
By integrating familiar aspects of physical pages with the freedom and interaction potential that the digital medium provides, it makes different kinds of content easier to read. Everybody interacts with information differently. In our daily lives, we are constantly making decisions about the way in which we process information. We curate everything we see. We choose how we read what we want to read. I believe this luxury of choice should be extended to academic material. We live in an age of confusion and are stuck between digital and physical media. Binder brings the intuitive part of paper, to the screen. This allows easy usage as well as flexibility. By allowing people to tailor their experience to what works best for them, we give them the chance to really dive into their material, they way they like.