Jack Schulze and Matt Webb have been on fire, lately. They’ve got a new blog, Pulse Laser (after the classic C64 game Elite). And in the first week or so, they’ve managed to write a bunch of things that made my inner design geek stand up and wave its little antennae around.
(I envision my inner design geek as a little bug, with spectacles and little markers clutched in its multifarious legs, bluefoam clinging to its carapace by static electricity. I have no idea why. Maybe it’s all the coffee I’ve drank today.)
I love S&W’s feel for the way networks, mobiles, and the web connect us together, separate from the specific interaction idioms we’re resigned to. They correctly focus on what it is we’re doing, rather than the tools we use to do them. It’s a neat trick, and it lets them come at problems from angles you wouldn’t think of if you were thinking within the GUI/Web/AJAX box.
Social Printing
Example: Matt re-imagines the printer as a social letterbox.
If my desktop printer understood the lessons of social software and Web 2.0, it wouldn’t be attached just to my computer or local network. It’d be accessible by my closest family and friends, too, regardless of where they lived. These people are my primary network, the folks for whom I’d put my neck on the line, and of course I’d let them use my paper and toner, just as I’d happily leave them with my house keys.
I like the idea, but personally don’t think it goes far enough.
For one thing, Matt envisions this using thermal paper. From someone who’s really into the feel of physical interactions, that surprises me; thermal paper is horrible stuff to handle. It just feels terrible in the hands, and it’s painful to read. I’d prefer it if the printer used something like, oh, say, 5×8 index cards. That would put your output onto things you could easily pick up, shuffle, and post up on the wall (if it’s something you like), or shred (if not).
Why not take the “fax machine” concept even further and integrate a document-feed scanner into it, as well?
Finally, you could very easily fix this up so that a digital copy of each printout is stored locally on your machine, and have that, along with some metadata, linked to the printout via visual marker recognition technology, giving each printout a data shadow. Wave the printout at the webcam in your MacBook, and you’ve got the sender (and maybe their public-key signature for verification), the original URL or file, and anything else that might be handy, ready to be blogged, posted to Flickr, saved in del.icio.us, or emailed.
Fixing Paper
What I find interesting isn’t replacing paper with the computer (or to put it another way, “paperlessness” is hardly a useful design goal, any more than “blue” would be). And it’s certainly not a luddite rejection of the computer in favor of paper. What is interesting is being able to start on paper and transition easily to and from digital media and paper, without regarding either as a “final” goal or medium.
Paper has some wonderful interaction properties: you use it with both hands; it’s the quintessential calm technology; its input is modeless; it can be endlessly annotated, dog-eared, scribbled on, folded into origami; it’s archival, whereas digital formats can be distressingly ephemeral; it can easily be shared with people in meatspace, without the messy interaction problems of screen sharing, video conferencing, and version tracking; and finally, it’s reliable and predictable – you know what you’re going to get when you manipulate paper.
Paper has disadvantages, too: it’s bulky; input is slow compared to typing; you can’t search it; it’s highly linear (in book form) or you can’t impose a good structure on it (in index card form); it’s really hard to hyperlink; delivery is a pain, requiring fax machines, FedEx, or Rube Goldberg-esque scripts linking paper scanners to email.
What I love about the social letterbox is its potential as one way to “fix” paper. It uses paper as a transitional format, which is easily shared with others in meatspace.
What I’d like to see more thought into, is what happens with the paper once it’s out of the printer. At the moment of printing, there’s a lot of rich metadata to tag the paper with; how can that be used, in an interaction scenario, to make the paper easily transition back into the computer?
How would you share it with others, in meatspace? Via email? And, if you were handed a printout from a social printer, how would you blog it, if you wanted to? Wouldn’t that be a great way to collaborate and share sketches, across a large distance?
This is what I mean by separating networked connection from the idioms we’re used to; with the advent of physical computing tools such as Arduino and Processing, sketches like this aren’t (necessarily) idle speculation. You could probably build a version 0.1alpha of something like this in an afternoon, with the right tools.
So I’ll continue to Pulse Laser for more of this stuff. And might get around to actually building something along these lines myself…