Scrapbook

Project Statment

Throughout my whole life, I have enjoyed reading, telling stories, and entering the lives and worlds of fiction and fantasy. However, throughout my time in college, I stopped reading books and started hanging out with friends, playing video games, and going to the movies instead. I feel as though it had a negative impact on my creativity and imagination as reading gave me an outlet that nothing else could.

In recent years stories have become more important to me as I’ve immersed myself a lot more in tv shows and books. However, with the internet, social media, and stigmatization surrounding reading, I have felt subconsciously pressured to keep my passion to myself and haven’t been able to share it with the outside world.

Midway through 2021, I discovered the online book "Omniscient Readers Viewpoint" which had forever change my life and rekindled my childhood passion. This book taught me more about who I am than any other story I've read before. To me, it was more of an experience than a book. I hope everyone can find a story that can ignite their own spark the way that Omniscient Reader did for me. Now that I've felt that emotion and feeling, I'm constantly searching for the next story that will give me that same spark as before.

I am looking to provide people with similar interests as mine a place to share their ideas, experiences, and feelings about stories in a way that is similar to a personal journal. Additionally, the added capability of allowing the user to share their entries with others both inside and outside of their groups can connect through nostalgia from revisiting their own or others' past experiences.

Following the design thinking methodology, along with a variety of secondary research, and conducting target audience-based surveys, I was able to get many responses with an inclination towards nostalgia and wanting to reflect on their past;

"I can remember myself re-enacting something from a story or having a similar connection to it"

"When I was younger I would delve into books to make me feel something."



As a concept, Scrapbook is an online interactive journal that allows users to record and document their feelings regarding books they have read. The purpose of this is to later relive their nostalgia and share their experiences within and outside the reading community.

This offers users the chance to think back on their past and experience the same emotions they once felt. This also gives them an opportunity to interact with their communities and benefit from this shared interest by sending each other new book recommendations, seeing what their friends are interested in, keeping updated with the current book talk, or having a way to express themselves within their book club.