177 www.aodr.org A Study on a Digital Reading Ecosystem based on Content for Flow Improvement Minjeong Kang 1 , Juhyun Eune 2* 1 Department of Craft and Design, Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea 2 Department of Craft and Design, Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea Background As the concept and behavior of reading is augmented in the digital environment, the importance of multi-modality becomes apparent while reading steps grow increasingly diverse and complex. his paper claims that ‘Flow’ occurs when users move through all of the reading steps seamlessly. In order to improve the Flow of digital reading, we aim to discover and examine the speciic reading stages and accompanying multimodal elements supporting each stage depending on the content type and suggest a digital reading ecosystem to promote and realize seamless reading for the achievement of Flow. Methods In this paper, we conducted a literature review and survey. The literature review was focused on the act of digital reading, multi-modality, Flow, and the derived reading stages. The survey investigated the discrepancies between a newspaper’s and a research paper’s reading stages and their multimodal elements. Based on the results we proposed a digital reading ecosystem. Results Following the literature review, we discovered that digital reading consists of three types of immersion: cognitive immersion created by the reader’s imagination, affective immersion that is related to interest and motivation, and participatory immersion that relies on the reader’s engagement. We extracted six reading stages of digital reading: approaching, judging, collecting, comprehending, sharing and creating. The results reveal differences between journal papers and news articles mainly in the reading process and multimodal elements of each stage. he process of journal papers involves the order of approaching, judging & collecting, comprehending and sharing. he process of news articles involves the order of approaching, judging, comprehending, collecting, sharing and creating. In terms of immersion, fast access is the most important factor for both contents. Secondly, reproducing the experience of reading from printed text, and expression tools, are critical elements for journal papers, communications via SNS, and related information are observed as the important elements for news articles. Conclusion Based on the results, we propose a digital reading ecosystem, which aids in realizing the seamless reading experience. We believe that this study provides useful insights in designing reading apps that encourage ‘Flow’ in digital reading for knowledge acquisition. Keywords Digital Reading, Multimodality, Flow, Reading process, Ecosystem Received Jan. 04. 2013 ; reviewed Jan. 25. 2013 ; Accepted Mar. 29. 2013 pISSN 1226-8046 eISSN 2288-2987(Online) Corresponding author: Juhyun Eune (jheune@snu.ac.kr) Citation: Kang, M., & Eune, J. (2013). A Study on a Digital Reading Ecosystem based on Content for Flow Improvement : Archives of Design Research, 26(3), 177-194. Copyright : This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/), which permits unrestricted educational and non-commercial use, provided the original work is properly cited.