Interactive Books for Children: Creative Experiments in the Relationship Between Text and Image

Abstract

In the development of interactive books for children dating back to the Nineteenth century, the child reader not only qualifies and defines the technical-constructive characteristics of these artifacts, but also directs their purposes, which vary, with different weight and meanings, from pure entertainment to edutainment. The aim of the first experimenters is increasing the “rate of playfulness” of the book/object as if it were a “paper platform” capable of containing and conveying manipulative aspects previously completely unrelated to that media but present in the doll or puppet games. After this pioneering phase, the second half of the nineteenth century witnessed the development of true ludic engineering based on an increasingly sophisticated cartotechnique, which also aimed at encompassing the pre-cinema experiments. This contribution analyzes in detail some significant cases in which the presence of devices has an evocative and narrative function and the purpose of making reading a playful activity, by acting on the relationship between text and images. In such “augmented reality” books the physical vision of the transformation of images causes an amplification of the affabulatory effect, responding to the needs of animism and artificialism peculiar to the child. The staging, made possible by its ability to magically interact with the book/object, is also stimulated by the presence of special signs in the paratext or specific messages included in the text, which nevertheless do not limit the child’s freedom. These solutions open a path to present experiments in multimedia, not always characterized by the same degree of creativity, perhaps owing to the great availability of technological means.