Manual Manuals: Media Reflexivity in Reading Through Tangible Artifacts

Abstract

Reading is a manual activity. The touch hands are ever- present: holding, turning, pointing, scrolling, clicking and scribbling are physical practices that engross people in the printed word. The project “AIME Tiles” began by thinking about howsystems of ideas can be translated into hybrid physical-concept tools. Further, the project attempts to resituate the scholarly activity of reading as a practice with its own material culture and media affordances. AIME Tiles, their design intent and construction are described as a modest sketch of tactile tools for scholarship— game pieces for playing with ideas while reading.