Wot is a book?


Luyao Dong, Digital Leisure, 2018
Paper scroll, Ikea bag, collected objects

In the post-digital era, the Internet has became an essential part of people’s daily life, I am from this time, where almost no one has experienced a life without internet in my generation. I felt numb of it, now the existence of Internet is almost unnoticeable for me compared to my earlier experience of internet, which was a very different experience. Personal computers became popular in China in the early 2000s, and my family owned our first PC with internet connectivity when I was five years old. In the early stage of personal computer development in China, one of the main purposes of personal computer in most of the families was for entertainment. In my early experience of using computers, the regular activities were online chat, browsing online forums, playing computer games and listening to musics. At that time, internet surfing was a very joyful and special experience. I was addicted to a game where I get to raise a virtual penguin, it was very popular in China during my primary school time. I was very sad when my penguin died, and I wanted to buy it another life, but I didn’t ask mum for money because it seemed foolish to spend money on a virtual pet at that time. There used to be solid boundaries between the real world and the virtual world. Now internet has become the major tool or way of leisure activities. Leisure is a important of people’s daily life, they are often unconscious and instinctual drives, I am very interested in leisure activities on internet in the post- digital era, specifically the effect of it and its relationship with the virtual and real world. As a communication designer, my role is to use line, shape, colour, font, layout and materials to design focus on interaction of information and shaping communication affordances. In the booklet design, I used different fonts and font sizes to distinguish different levels and define hierarchy of information. Lines and shapes are used to represent the logic of the article. Materials used in the work have strong characters, they are related to the approaches of this project, textures are supplement to the main object and contrast with each other. I have done background research in the early stage of this project, I should have a good understanding and plan of my approach and process to best express my concept. The work for the booklet is mainly editorial work, where I focused on visualise the information and improve the functionality. I carefully chosen contents which have clear logic and well organised information to put in the booklet, I felt they are more suitable for this project. In my design practice, I focus on the effectiveness and efficiency of communication through the design of materials and narrative of the object (not only physical objects, but also plane visual elements and textual contents) itself rather than deliberately pursue refinement of technique. In this project ,I focused on using found objects to explore materials. Through research, I found out that Found photography is actually a similar activities as experimenting with found objects, which Found photography is based on recovery of lost, unclaimed photographs, internet made Found photography more popular, which can be a post-digital experience. Compared to found object, one is in the virtual world, one is in the real world.