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MIT Press launches its first iPad app

App brings to life the images in NONOBJECT, a design book by Branko Lukić and Barry Katz.
Screenshot from NONOBJECT on the iPad
Caption:
Screenshot from NONOBJECT on the iPad
Credits:
Image: MIT Press/Apple

The MIT Press has launched its first iPad app, an iPad edition of NONOBJECT, by Branko Lukić and Barry Katz.

NONOBJECT offers a series of dramatic explorations of objects that can’t exist but perhaps should. Branko Lukić and Barry Katz imagine what happens when design starts from the space between people and the objects they use. NONOBJECT is the designer’s personal exploration of our complex, often contradictory interactions with the observable world. Inspired by Debussy’s notion of music existing in the “space between the notes,” the world of the “nonobject” is about perception, experience, and possibility.

The NONOBJECT app brings the book’s images to life in vivid detail and opens a new frontier in design publishing. Complementing the printed book but going beyond it, the app allows a new level of interactive engagement for the user. Some nonobjects are derived from undiscovered materials, others from imagined manufacturing processes and invented rules. Flexible navigation, interactive 360-degree views, touch-enabled controls, and full-screen movies immerse the viewer in the nonobject world and show what these objects would be like if they did exist.

“We get excited about those pairings of content and technology that genuinely benefit the reader,” said MIT Press Director Ellen W. Faran. “How better to experience these unbounded nonobjects which open our minds than to explore them in new and infinitely varying ways in the NONOBJECT app?”

The NONOBJECT iPad app features:
  • Nonlinear open book and mosaic visual browsing
  • 176 full-screen hi-res pages
  • 25 interactive movies that allows the user to rotate and visualize the images in up to full 360°
  • 6 full screen HD movies of the nonobjects
  • Beautiful two page wide screen spreads showing all the nonobjects in striking detail.
Ultimately, in the NONOBJECT iPad app, production design meets philosophy, poetry, and the theater of an imagination that acknowledges no limits. The app is now available at the iTunes app store.

The print edition of NONOBJECT was published in early November, and the iPad app edition is now available from the Apple iPad store for an introductory price of $19.99.

iPad Demo Final from NONOBJECT on Vimeo.


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