Project
Prose
Reimagined the academic article as a digital-native interactive experience — a research project exploring how design can make scholarly work more accessible and engaging.
2025
A research-creation project for my master’s thesis, Prose is a speculation on how the digital form of academic articles needs to evolve to afford interactive reading. It foregrounds the processes involved in academic reading as part of the artifact, and proposes the Article as Software – a digital-first academic article that affords like a digital artifact, rather than a static skeuomorphism of years past.
Academic articles in their digital form are skeuomorphic: a linear translation from paper to screen. This linear translation makes engagement with digital text awkward and also creates a boundary between the form of the article and the form of the digital reader. Attempts to solve this problem retain the PDF form and enhance it by revising either the ISO standard, or readers that can read a certain type of PDF formats with plugins.
Based on the assumption that the existing forms and tools for academic reading and publication are saturated, this research re-imagines and speculates on a digital-first form of the academic article that breaks the constraints imposed by PDFs. With a Research through Design (RtD) approach – iterative prototyping and design journaling, this project calls for a paradigm shift: from Article as Files to Article as Software. It re-imagines the form of the digital academic article as a digital-first artifact, and explores the design space of the digital-first academic article (DFA). Instead of setting it up for printing and archival, the goal is to establish a unique identity of the digital research article that affords enhanced reading and learning from academic text.
Prose is a container of four prototypes (a total of eight variants including sub-versions) that explores evolving forms of the digital article. I built this system with a vision for an article that is not so rigid in its structure like PDFs, one that is dynamic and responsive to the reader, one that invites the reader to write and reflect alongside reading, and one that is able to scale by including other interactive media.
I wanted to see each of these aspects be introduced gradually to simulate a kind of evolution; the article is evolving and at every stage introduces a different aspect of a DFA. So prototype zero represents the idea of the article being fluid, one represents the idea of metacues and meta-interactions that guide the reader and give them more control. Two introduces writing and reflecting alongside a meta-cue enabled reading in a fluid form, and three introduces having interactive media embedded in a reflection enabled paper.