What's the best way to teach a kid about the forces that shape the Earth? You could let her read about the subject, or give her some diagrams to look at.
Or you could just let her have a go at doing the shaping herself.
That's the thinking behind Earth: A Primer, a new interactive book for the iPad. It covers the basics of geology---how volcanoes form, how erosion works---but instead of simply telling you about these processes, it actually lets you control them. Each topic's page pairs text and a simulation, distilling millions of years of geologic activity into a bright multitouch plaything. Like a deity in training, you can sculpt mountains, summon rain storms, and move tectonic plates with your fingertips. It's a novel way to learn about our planet, certainly. But it's also an inspiring design experiment, and a reminder that interactive media is a young and undeveloped world itself.
The app's genesis dates back nearly five years, and its creation involves some noteworthy influences. It was developed by Chaim Gingold, an interactive designer based in San Francisco. Gingold had just finished building the Creature Creator for Spore, Will Wright's ambitious simulation game, and had started work on an ambitious simulation game of his own. But it was too big a task for a lone designer, so he turned his focus on one component: the game's geology simulator.
Around this time, Gingold became acquainted with the visionary designer Bret Victor. Victor had just finished building the interactive graphics for Our Choice, Al Gore's climate change app. Elegantly marrying multimedia and text, it was a sensation in design circles when it was released. (Victor would soon join Apple to prototype futuristic interfaces. The small team he worked with, Push Pop Press, would go on to build the elegant Paper app for Facebook). Gingold decided not to use his geology engine for a game at all. He resolved to make an interactive book instead.
Gingold was by then a PhD candidate in UC Santa Cruz's acclaimed game design program. The book gave him the chance to work through some thorny questions concerning interactive media. "For me, a really huge motivation, beyond the geology, was to help define a genre," he says. "That's the design challenge: What is this genre of interactive books? What does it mean to organically link up a simulation that's interactive and playful, like you might find in a game, with a book."
Though Gingold quickly settled on the basic format---text on one side of the screen, simulation on the other---it took meticulous fine-tuning to get the experience just right. Navigation posed one early problem. Initially, the designer had a table of contents at the beginning of the book. But in testing, readers used it to jump haphazardly from section to section. So Gingold drew from the game designer's playbook, ditching the table of contents entirely and dropping readers straight into the first section instead. From there, they have no choice but to progress linearly from topic to topic, "unlocking" their terraforming powers one at a time as they go.
Gingold also had to figure out how to make the text and the models work together. It was a subtle challenge, but a crucial one. We know what to do with books, and we know what to do with games, but what do we do when they're side by side?
Ultimately, Gingold settled on a model where the text instructs you to do things in the simulation beside it. After a few explanatory sentences, the text will implore you to try raising the water level, say, or to see what happens when you lower the temperature. When you do so, a little green check mark appears next to the prompt. The check marks effectively create a feedback loop between the two different types of interaction. They help establish a behavioral pattern for this new type of text: first you read, then you play.
Today, Earth: A Primer feels like a curiosity. It's part-textbook, part-toy, but perhaps not enough of either to find a huge audience. It is, however, an instantly intriguing thing, and I don't doubt a handful of youngsters will come across it and think, "Wow, Earth is pretty cool. Who knew."
More importantly for Gingold, though, is the small role the app will play in that long, steady process of defining a new, dynamic genre. "When the printing press comes along, we don't immediately get the novel," he points out "The novel had to be invented." Gigold's app is for kids, but not just for them. "The thing that would make me most happy," he says, "is for other designers to see this and rip it off."
