Travellers & City Dwellers adding layers of depth to cities.
September 7th, 2006
Moleskin is about to launch a new series of guidebooks called City Notebook, giving travelers and city dwellers the opportunity to write their own guides.
Very, very fun.
More on the books:
The custom guidebooks feature a map of the greater area as well as smaller detail maps, a metro map and station index, a filing system for food, people, and places, 48 adhesive labels for personalizing, detachable sheets for quick messages, and tri-color ribbon bookmarks the City Notebook is a way to explore a place you’re just getting to know or to catalog a place you already love.
What’s really cool about the little books are the included stick-on translucent overlays which make it easy to trace one’s own path along the maps or to design a custon walking tour. Held secure by the standard elastic closure and sewn bindings, sturdy construction makes Moleskine notebooks steadfast travel companions—not to mention that the classic nondescript black cover doesn’t scream “tourist.”
Launching this October in London the City Notebooks will be available for Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, Dublin, Lisbon, London, Madrid, Milan, Paris, Prague, Rome, and Vienna, with books for Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, Montreal, New York and San Francisco slated for 2007.
Why are we interested in this? Well we think there is a unique and fun possiblity in retaking cities, in rescoping them with personalized added levels of content - new levels of dimesion and fun. Even more exciting to us is how these new levels of information can be shared to add even more levels of depth. In Japan we’re working with QR Codes to intergrate the real world with the digital world. (read about our work using QR Codes in Mobile + Outdoor media campaigns). Imagine if personalized diary guide books could record your navigation and store the information to be shared with family and friends. The future is even more exciting - we’re visualizing a world when walking by hot spots pushs content to users. Imagine walking by an historical building and learning that Coke sold its first bottle there in 1956). From geo-coding locations via photo sharing sites like Flickr, to accessing sites in real life via your cell phone - we think the future is definitely interesting. While we don’t yet see the future like the Tom Cruise movie Minority Report in which billboards flash custom advertisements to individuals who pass by - we see a present and future where the role is reversed - where individuals can pull information from sites using cell phones, computers, and other gadgets just like they are in Japan via QR Codes.
Stateside - we’re impressed with what Counts Media has been doing.
They’ve rescoped DC with an interesting information from a documentarian Punk type perspective. Very interesting indeed.
“ Yellow Arrows Point the Way to D.C.’s Punk Past “
Watch carefully in the coming weeks and you may see them. People roaming the streets of Chinatown, Adams Morgan, Mt. Pleasant. They’ll stop to check their cell phone, punch the keys, wait, check again, then move walk down the street looking with strange interest at empty buildings, houses and random Starbucks. Yellow Arrow’s Capitol of Punk tour, which we previewed in May, kicked off this week, turning D.C. streets into an impromptu museum for a look back at the city’s storied punk rock history, from back in the days when “harDCore” was spelled with a capital “D.C.”
