There really is too much to summarize in a single post, but here are some of the highlights as I saw them.

People

I had the honor of meeting and befriending some amazing folks. A partial list:

Jennifer Magnolfi, Matt Jones, Timo Arnall, Matt Cottam, Michelle Malott, Chris McCray, Charles Warren, and probably a half-dozen others whose contact data I haven’t pulled out and reviewed yet. (Sorry!)

We managed to spend most of the summit sitting at a table in back, with half of us working on their presentation for the next day while listening to the presentation, and the other half listening to the presentations and exchanging (occasionally snarky) comments on twitter.

The GooglePhone’s internal compass and its ability to do an augmented-reality view with it, using Google Street View, was the technological nerdgasm of the weekend.

PaperCamp

The highlight of the weekend, for me, was meeting Matt and Timo, and getting to talk about paper as prototype spime.

(It was a bit gratifying, when meeting Matt, to be greeted with, “Oh, you’re that guy!” Admittedly, that’s usually what people say when a locally infamous eccentric shows up at a party, but it was fun nonetheless.)

Timo made the insightful comment that the idea of just attaching a URL to paper is kind of broken, and we need richer and more interesting interaction patterns. He and I agreed that the usability of QRCodes is quite poor as they stand, but they are a printable, inexpensive analog for passive RFID and touch interaction in some ways.

Matt percolated a bit, and came up with the idea of having a PaperCamp event for like-minded people to explore what can be done with printable protospimes.

Matt’s suggested topics:

• Way-new Printing
• Protospimes
• Ingestion/Digestion/Representation
• Bionic Sketching
• Folding/Structure
• Paper’s Children

(“What would Paper’s Children be,” I asked. “That’s the point, I’m asking you,” Matt said.)

(I have some ideas about that, but let’s save it for later.)

Memes!

Some ideas that got bounced around, from talks, hallway discussion, and drunken ranting:

• Personal Informatics
• Game Mechanics for motivation and change
• Manatee Rape Waivers – band name, or legal necessity?
• The lack of personal fear in a welfare state (Norway)
• Warren Ellis won’t actually eat your heart if you buy him a beer.
  (Matt claimed this, but I’m still skeptical)
• Obama as the president in Independence Day
• RFID fields as physical objects
• Wii Fit and Nike Plus –- and how you should be able to change and record the messages in both
• Will the FUBAR security fiasco in Mifare RFID chips harm NFC adoption? (Yes.)

So, in other words, we made as much sense as you’d expect.

On the whole, as I said later, it was simply refreshing to show an example of my thought experiments and for people to not look at me like a dog that’s been shown a card trick. Worth the price of admission right there.

Thank-you’s

I really have to thank Dave for inviting me, and of course the summit organizers, Michelle Bauer and Mary Craig for allowing me to attend. Also, everyone else for being generally awesome.

What’s next?

Well, I just got this, from Matt Jones:

@paperbit 15.24, restate your assumptions.

Sounds like a good place to start.

Fantastic essay on the way that the tools we use shape us.

I sketch almost all the parts I make. This sort of back of the envelope scribbling is very different from precise engineering drawings – I change my mind all the time, scrubbing over the lines again and again. Drawing like this is a wonderful tool for thinking, for exploring different solutions, rejecting bad ones and developing good ones. I also use Solidworks, and I can see the power of CAD programs like this, though I still prefer drawing. Drawing parts is actually very similar to drawing cartoons – scrubbing over lines, trying to make the idea clear and concise, thinking up endless variations and embellishments.

Drawing parts does depend on experience. I don’t remember drawing my machines much as a child, and when I started making things again after leaving Cambridge I still did very little drawing, working out the detail by trial and error. There were so many factors, particularly with moving parts, that drawings didn’t help with – will a lever be rigid enough, will a spring counteract a weight, will a grub screw be enough to hold a pulley on a shaft, will a motor be powerful enough, will it stop quickly enough. The only way to find out things like this was to try them. There is something intuitively obvious that it must be a good idea to make use of as many of the senses as possible (smells and sounds can also be very useful in identifying a problem), but in practice trying everything out is very slow. With experience, it’s much quicker to solve design problems on paper…

My cluttered workshop, particularly the comprehensive stores of bits I’ve salvaged or otherwise acquired, is also vital to my working process. Browsing through my stores, I often think of a better way of making a part, and sometimes ways of adapting something I’ve already got. The stores and the tools are literally an extension of my brain, a physical version of a memory map. Anything I can’t find in my stores will be in one of my many vast catalogues. Rural sheds may seem quaint but they are no longer cut off from the world. Modern distribution means I can get anything within 24 hours.

(Via Matt Jones.)

I’ve come to the hypothesis that all engineering problems can be solved through the methodical appliance of yellow stickers.

It’s amazing how much you can talk and talk, but when you finally draw it all up and put it on the wall, and rearrange a bit, suddenly things just become clear.

Amen.

It’s a handsome spiral-bound sketchbook, with slightly-toothy paper that takes pencil well, and erases nicely. I’ve had a love-hate relationship with it for the last few weeks, and I’m trying to work out why.

Impression

The book is attractive in a way that’s qualitatively different from a Moleskine. The matte rubberized cover feels nice, and the Helvetica Strong embossed on the cover tickles my inner modernist swiss-grid snob.

It’s a non-standard size, something not really shown well in the photo: Ten and a half inches by nine inches, minus the spiral binding. The odd size is a result of the notebook’s double perforation, on which more will be said later.

Grid

My inner demon is a swiss designer with a shaved head, twin degrees in graphic design and architecture, rimless glasses, a mechanical pencil tucked behind one ear, and an obsessive-compulsive fixation on the typographic grid. It’s like having Joseph Müller-Brockmann as your invisible friend, which is not as much fun as it sounds like.

What I am trying to get across is, I like grids for sketching.

For years, I’ve been sketching diagrams and ideas on index cards and moleskine pocket sketchbooks.

But that’s a pretty small area to sketch in, even when you use both pages. Worse, the grid itself is difficult to filter out; if you scan it, you can’t get rid of it. It’s as if the scaffolding on a building is welded on, impossible to remove, even once construction has been completed.

The dot grid book neatly does away with both complaints.

In an inked and scanned sketch, the dots can be faded right out with photoshop, without any loss of detail. What’s more, the larger format frees up a needless constraint. It’s like taking off a heavy, binding wool sweater, and feeling a looseness in your arms that you had forgotten was lost.

Bound

And now I have to talk about the perforation and spiral binding.

If you look closely at the photo above, you can see that each page has two perforations. One, next to the binding, gives you a tear-off page with holes for a three-ring binder. The other lets you tear off a page with no binder holes.

Brilliant.

And yet.

The spiral of the sketchbook is of a decent quality, not cheap or flimsy. It’s tight, which is generally a good thing — if you’re going to carry something around in a backpack or satchel, you don’t want the spiral to get mangled. The binding on mine is in perfect condition, as far as visual inspection is concerned. None of which prevents this from happening:

Argh.

Every time I open the sketchbook, the pages get hung up on some point in the spiral binding, and need to be carefully re-adjusted, so that the paper doesn’t tear along a perforation.

So far, this is a minor pain, something that’s worked around by mindful handling of the paper. But I live in dread of the day that I have a brainstorm, try to pop the sketchbook open, and riiiiiiiiiippp. I can envision a day where I have a half-dozen pages sliding out of the sketchbook whenever I open it, edges worn ragged by my backpack.

Love

Despite that gripe, I still love the book. Every other detail has been seen to with care; the weight and tooth of the paper are a delight. Soft pencil clings to the paper, and adjacent pages stay free of pencil marks. Anyone who has come back to an older sketchbook and found ghost images all over facing pages knows what I mean when I say that that, alone, is a small blessing.

So far, the perforations have held up, and I have some hope that when I’m past the first dozen pages, the weight of the collective pages being turned will protect it from damage. At least, that’s the case when I open the book to random pages in the middle. Still, it would be nice if the first few weeks of using the book weren’t so precarious.

And, again, the dot grid is a lovely innovation. It fades into the background behind a sketch, providing structure without overwhelming, one photoshop filter away from disappearing.

Conclusion

If you’re looking for a workbook to sketch in, and you like a quadrille grid, you’ve found it. It’s perfect for the office, studio, or laptop case.

It is not a carry-everywhere thought capture tool, and doesn’t pretend to be. The spiral binding reduces the book’s portability, and it’s not exactly a convenient size for carrying around, so this isn’t a ubiquitous capture device. You want index cards or a pocket moleskine notebook for that.

But it is an excellent medium for expanding some rough ideas into sketches without advanced planning. With a paper sketchbook, you don’t have to worry about mode, like a computer forces you to: do I use OmniGraffle for this? Text? Maybe I should use Photoshop…

The Dot Grid book is a modeless interface, and the perforations and scanner-friendly grid means that whatever content you capture, it isn’t lost in an analog silo.

If you’re looking for a sketchbook, I’d advise you to at least give it a shot. At US$14.00 for a 50 page book, it’s a bit pricey, but worth it if you overuse your sketchbook as much as I do.

Vladimir Nabokov wrote on index cards, and this enabled him to create wonderfully nonlinear books. One of my favorites is Pale Fire, a book that manages to tell three stories at once, written as the critical analysis of an autobiographical poem.

If that description sounds about as much fun as being repeatedly punched in the balls by circus midgets while alphabetizing census records, I assure you that it is anything but.

In any case, I’d like to take Pale Fire (which is sort of about, and definitely revolves around, an autobiographical poem written in pencil on index cards), and make an edition of it with the poem printed both traditionally (in the first section), and also on index cards. These would be spread through the pages of the book, which is ostensibly a criticism of the poem itself (although it isn’t really, and the book should certainly be read to see why).

What makes the idea seductive to me is that you could easily use semacodes to link the cards (and individual notes on the poem’s stanzas in the “commentary” pages) to an online, networked version. I imagine it as being like a blog, with wiki-style comments.

If done correctly, the result would be a networked book, on paper.

Why?

Well, since there are many possible ways to read the book, and no real authorial word on which is the “true” story, the reader would be invited to join the commentary and argument over the book. This might provide a different way of engaging the story than reading and even discussing the “dumb” paper version.

In addition, the paper itself provides affordances for physical annotation, offline reading, and mixed media, with the additional interest of the poem’s “original” itself being provided along with the printed version.

(Incidentally, this would also fulfill a long-standing geek dream of mine: I’d love to be able to trackback-ping a passage from a paper book I’m reading, from my blog. And see the trackback when I reread the book.)

It would also be a wonderful interaction- and graphic-design problem to solve. With index cards. And data shadows.

The concept is an attractive nuisance. I really can’t let it go, but I really have no idea how to go about getting the rights to do so. Pale Fire is, after all, still under copyright. And I’m not a printer, by any means. But damn, I can’t let the idea go.

This is what happens when I empty out a month or two’s worth of photographs from my camera at once…

(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…

For example, I thought I was the interweb’s “index card guy.” But it seems I’m going to have to cede the title to Flickr user hawxexpress, whose photoset, Maximizing Productivity, puts me to shame. Burning, painful shame.

Virtual Memory must be Small

I mean, check out that handwriting. Jeebus.

Elseweb (is that a word?) Flickr user BookMonger (a.k.a. John Doull) has a lovely photo stream full of book pr0n and eccentric oddments…

For example, Pozzoni’s Medicated Bookmark, for “ladies who value a refined complexion”.

I must admit that I had heretofore overlooked the bookmark’s utility as a dispenser for medication. And now we have learned something new.

John is also a member of several Flickr Groups, such as the Bookmarks group.

Dolphin Bookmarks

Another group found via John is:

The Catalogue Cards & Card Catalogues Memorial Pool

card catalog

I absolutely love card catalogs, although I can’t afford one right now. This makes me sad. I plan to stalk the card catalog group like a chocolate addict hounding a candy shop.

That’s all the candy I got. More at some point when the urge strikes me…

While we were on vacation (yes, yes, Italians love vacations…and even more this year, since we had something to celebrate after the World Cup!) we received 37 several e-mails. There also has been some discussion on several Internet groups: Google and Flickr among others.

We just got back and here we are answering our customers having trouble with their Moleskine Notebooks. First of all, WE APOLOGIZE FOR THE SILENCE, but – like many Moleskiners may already know – we are a very small company: 15 people total! And we personally follow the customer care.

Obviously, if you’re having quality problems with your moleskine notebook, you should read the post at Moleskinerie, since there’s important information there regarding quality-control serial numbers that you can use to help Moleskine track down manufacturing problems.

Starting last June we added a number printed on the Moleskine flyer (see image [below]), which allows us to identify the time, place and lot of production. This enables us to address any possible problems pertaining to a specific batch. If you don’t have this flyer in your notebook, you will, as soon as the inventory in the shops updates.

As the post on the 43 Folders Google Group above notes, many people with issues had been trying to contact moleskineus (no link), with no response.

Modo & Modo, on the other hand, mentions that they found complaints about the quality of their product on Google and Flickr; that is, once they were alerted via email, they looked on the web and found out that there was discussion going on that hurt their brand.

They could have delivered a nastygram and force people to take down photos of their defective product, like certain popular electronic companies have done recently. Or, they could have issued a press release on their website, like, um, certain popular electronics companies. They didn’t do either.

I really wish this kind of customer service wasn’t so unusual. In any case, it’s a rare and informative example of what to do when things go wrong with your product.

Russian design company Maslov introduces USB-powered E-Paper, a programmable cardboard tablet that joins shortcut technology with good ol’ fashioned hand-written notes. Post-its recommended.

First reaction: OMGWTF!

Second reaction: Sweet Jeebus, don’t tell me that this is a fricking piece of cardboard with a USB cable attached.

Sadly, given that Maslov’s website is a flash slideshow of some admittedly-pretty cell phones and cardboard recyclable stuff, I have to regretfully conclude that my second impression seems to be true.

Although I’d love to be proved wrong.

It seems that, in the early 21st century, high-concept product design has morphed from magic blobject with an LCD glued on, which miraculously solves all your problems to magic paper with a USB cable crammed up its ass, which miraculously solves all your problems.

Progress. Of a sort.

For example, Montblanc pens are things of beauty.

These fetish items have wonderful writing qualities, but they cost obscene amounts of money. Here are instructions on how to convert a Montblanc refill to work with a Pilot G2, thus getting the feel of a $200 pen with a $2 Pilot.

…I wonder if that violates the DCMA somehow?

In any case, it’s a great hack, and yet another reason why Instructables rocks.

And, if you want something to write in with your awesome new pen, you could get one of the new Moleskine City Notebooks. (Photos of a prototype, taken by lucky Moleskine user and MoleskineArt.com web maven Patrick Ng: all images are from his photoset.)

The fold-out maps look gorgeous.

I love all the wonderful little thoughtful details, like the translucent overlays you can use to mark up the maps non-destructively…

…and the multiple fabric bookmarks…

…and the tabs, with iconic stickers to sort your notes on the city.

Finally, if your city gets no Moleskine love, you can always make your own.

(Edited to fix the fact that you really can’t hack a fountain pen to work with a pilot G2…)