Logbook

Most museum apps try to give you everything: catalogs, maps, audio, deep navigation trees. Logbook offers the opposite: an empty book. As you explore an exhibition, you fill it with stamps. Press a physical stamp onto your phone’s screen at any station, and the related article, photos, and videos land in your personal logbook, to browse on the spot, or at home, where revisiting the experience matters as much as the hours on location.

The stamps are the trick. We knew multitouch tables could recognize objects through fiducial markers, but how could that work on an iPhone’s capacitive screen? Our workaround: translate the fiducial idea into patterns of touch points. Each wooden stamp carries conductive pads at defined distances, wired to a copper contact at the top. When the stamp (and the hand holding it) touches the screen, the app recognizes its unique touch pattern. Varying the number and spacing of the points makes the variations practically endless, with no extra hardware, no RFID readers, and none of the tedium of QR codes.

Stamps also carry meaning that pure digital check-ins don’t: passport pages, event hand-stamps, the pilgrim’s credential on the Way of St. James. Pressing one onto a screen borrows that physicality; the soft pads even give a little under pressure. In testing, people would stamp a dozen times just for the feeling of it, grinning at an iPhone that usually produces emotionless faces. That reaction, more than anything, confirmed the concept.

The app itself stays deliberately flat: three swipeable views (Collection, Review, Map), with navigation adapted from Path and Facebook, and subtle paper textures that keep the illusion of stamping into a real logbook.

The concept had a second, sketchier half: »Der Hafen« (the harbor), a place to linger at the center of the exhibition, where the information collected along the way gets unloaded and traded. It takes the form of a cube with a screen on each of its four sides. Visitors would log in with a stamp, let their logbook flow in, and see their interests next to those of other visitors; the screens would also introduce research sites, and a survey on the phone would let visitors leave a trace of their own. The sketches and wireframes are on our project page at FH Potsdam (in German).

We developed the concept in the winter semester 2011/12, in the course “Connect to Science” at the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam (Prof. Matthias Krohn), based on the Max Planck Society’s touring Science Tunnel 3.0 exhibition, and built a working iPhone prototype with custom-made stamps. For production, the stamps would need conductive, 3D-printable material with individual designs on the bottom. The proof of concept works; the product design would be the next step.

More on the Logbook microsite, built together with Florian Schulz and Wenke Kramp. That same semester, Florian and I also designed Cycle Mail with Gunnar Friedrich.

Stamp faces and »Der Hafen« sketch: Wenke Kramp.