02 How to Make a Notebook: the 1 st lesson

The first lesson of the class for our Phi Phi Design Build Workshop is how to make a notebook. The notebook will be used in the class, during the workshop. It will have to be the documentation tool to map your ideas... - the first lesson of how to be a 'good' designer.

The main reference is from this book, Interaction Desing Premier ( vol. 1), published by Postmedia Books Milan. It is a book written by all the people I know very well: Stefano Mirti, Walter Aprile and Britta Boland. They are an architect, a computer scientist, and a graphic designer who worked and taught together at Interaction Design Institute Ivrea for five years. The book is about 'how to design' anything, not only interaction design.



It gives you a reference of design and how it works with technology from quite a radical approach. The significant point of the book is that the book is printed only the chapter overview. The rest is in the DVD attached to the book, where you have video clips and so on too. :)



The making of your own notebook requires a lot of careful thoughts: from what is your habit, how you use the notebook, where you will use it, where to buy the materials and tools...and so on. It is quite elaborated process..

These are some sample pages from the book. The graphic is quite nice: a compliment to Britta.



Then we discussed about some example of a notebook and its owner. Here is Pim and her fancy Moleskine notebook with an elastic band and a little pocket inside.


The student presented the notebooks they made upon the class situation and the workshop. Here are some interesting ones, few out of 24.

Here is Name's notebook. His notebook is all waterproof! Instead of paper, he uses plastic with waterproof pen... well, this allows no mistake of drawing and writing..


Toey's notebook has three kinds of paper: normal 80-gram paper, water color paper and tracing paper for any purpose you can imagine.


This is Joe's notebook. Perhaps the most popular one. He likes to skecth very much, and most of the time he has a problem comparing his old sketches with the new ones.. because of way the pages are binded together. His solution is this special binding that you can move and flip the page on both sides.. so you can see two or three pages at the same time. although they are not binded next to each other. :O


Well, the binding is a little bit complex - personally I don't understand it completely still.. but it is nice and interesting. :)

The last one if Fam's notebook, a very organized one. She divides her notebook into two parts: the metric which could fit the sketch, the concept and the context at the same time, the other one is called mind mapping part, where she could make diagrams into more or less unlimited space....:O




Well, hope the notebooks are good enough to keep all the good ideas for the building then!