Fukushima farmers book

13 years ago, on March 11th 2011, Japan experienced a horrible disaster, that started with a 9.0 magnitude earth wake, followed by 10 meters tsunami waves that caused the Fukushima nuclear accident.

Following the accident, at least 164,000 residents of the Fukushima surrounding area were displaced.

Since then, Fukushima prefecture is recovering.

Few months ago, HP Japan asked my help to produce variable data books for Shiokuribito.

Shiokuribito web site https://shiokuribito.com/pages/about.

Shiokuribito is an e-commerce site operated by the Fukushima Prefecture Chamber of Commerce and Industry Federation. The site is encouraging users to enjoy the delicacies of Fukushima and order local products.

100 farmers from Fukushima Prefecture are introduced with their stories, along with their products.

Products that are offered in the site include Fukushima local specialties and local products as local cuisine and crafts, or peaches and persimmons fruits.

From tofu craftsmen to Japanese confectionery craftsmen, potters to papier-mâché craftsmen.

You may find there farmers titles as 'Craft Beer Researcher' or 'Live Fish/Fresh Fish Connoisseur'.

Although some farmers may have similar titles, each person's story is different, so the user is getting familiar with the farmer life and then makes his order choice after he is familiar with the farmer personality.

After the users are familiar with a farmer life, they can purchase products.

Siocribito ‘puts their heart’ into creating a nice packaging the products.

Designing the books

Shiokuribito wanted to provide a similar user experience from the web site, to the printed books. Every farmer was described in 2 facing pages that includes episodes that expose their personality.

Episodes included stories about how the farmers are are making products, to stories about their family and memories. Users may enjoy these stories that make you laugh and cry.

Each book includes an introduction, an overview about Fukushima, and the stories and pictures of all the 100 farmers, total of 240 pages per book.

Episodes are capricious.

Humans are fickle. Similarly, the Siocribito episodes are also whimsical. Each time you access the Siocribito web page, the episodes and order change, giving you a different look.

Same for the personalized books. We wanted each book to include different selections of episodes, randomly selected from a wide collection of the farmer stories. No two books are the same.

Graphicly, each episode has a different size, so we positioned the episodes dynamically, 2 to 4 episodes per page according to width and height, with a layout that will look nice to the user.

The dynamic variable layout algorithm resembles the HP SmartStream Designer ‘Arrange’ pages feature (US patent 8605323 - Automated Imposition, Gaash et al.).

Production

The job was designed with HP SmartStream Designer, using HP Spark to define the dynamic algorithm for generating the variable layouts and content.

The variable job was composed on HP SmartStream Composer, and printed on HP Indigo presses.

500 copies were produced, and distributed to business associates and the farmers.

This project was done with the HP Japan team, Keisuke Ozawa, Maki Mori, and Kenta Taguchi. Thank you, you are a great team to work with!