Paper

I meant to share this on April first, but I had too much stuff lined up, but I still think it’d be nice to have this here. Consider this my love letter to paper, the gold standard for malleable systems!

Software must be as easy to change as it is to use it.

So many features of the paper can be played with, the size, color and the folding, that it’s near impossible to recognize some of the shapes paper systems can take. Very little more than a pencil is needed to operate paper, and if origami tells us anything, is that maybe even the pencil can be done away with. It’s quite safe to operate, other than the occasional papercut.

All layers, from the user interface through functionality to the data within, must support arbitrary recombination and reuse in new environments

Paper can be expanded with an endless collection of mechanical tools. And new tools can be created out of paper itself, like how a blacksmith might craft new metal tools to make possible the craft of blacksmithing.

Tools should strive to be easy to begin working with but still have lots of open-ended potential

Paper can easily emulate computers, but computers cannot emulate paper. They can hold the knowledge required to expand on the content it holds, the accessibility of the operation required from the user varies, but even to a blind person, textured paper might remain usable.

People of all experience levels must be able to retain ownership and control

Nomographic methods can give deep insight into how systems we take for granted works. There are no DRMs or dependencies(unless some information is spread across multiple instances of the medium)

Recombined workflows and experiences must be freely sharable with others

Paper is cheap, and can be transcribed or even photocopied, making the knowledge it records easily transmissible. Uses no power, and if protected from weather, will hold on to what it holds for a LONG TIME.

Modifying a system should happen in the context of use, rather than through some separate development toolchain and skill set

Sometimes evaluating a program(or just checking off items from a todo list) infer physical changes to the medium with the same tool the medium was created with.

Computing should be a thoughtfully crafted, fun, and empowering experience

Ending note, I think we haven’t even begun scratching the surface of what can be done with paper :slight_smile:

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It is pretty hard to beat paper, isn’t it.

In my garage is a printout of a family tree database I made in BASIC as a kid in the mid-1980s. The 5.25" floppy disks would be long since unreadable even if I’d kept them.

But paper endures. Maybe not as well as stone or clay, but for a few decades.

In some ways I feel like “UTF-8 text file” is almost our new paper. Almost. Still got to have a zipfile to put it in. Maybe JPG/PNG and PDF might survive for a while… audio/video gets blurry at MP4 (which codec?)

Forget about foldable smartphones!
Foldable paper is the next big thing!

I know it is hard to imagine. I had this révélation while using my Galaxy fold 6. If instead of a screen, we had something else where we could draw pictures… Ok… and it needs to be foldable. I know that in paper we can draw, as in most books, but can it fold?

I took a piece of paper, I joined the 2 corners together and I gently squized the two halves of the paper together, afraid the paper would break. It worked!!! The paper CAN fold.

This story tells us that new technology can provide insight in how to use old objects in ways that were never thought before.

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Speaking of folding, for my paper computer, I favor the zine fold. It makes for a quick 8 pages booklet, that is hard enough to write on in your palm with ball point pen. I have 4 of these blank zines on me, bound with a paper clip at all times. I haven’t had a smartphone in 9 years.

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Just found this bizarre looking website with lots of cool paper computation ideas for elementary arithmetic:

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