We’re interested in this idea of ‘the weather’, of the inherent conditions of something. You can think of things having a weather, just as places do, and you usually just have to work with it. If you’re a coder, you have to work with the weather of the Amazon S3 server…We opt to be part of the cultural landscape. We’re obsessed with these ideas of the near future, of the universe next door, by extrapolating peculiar edges
From “Little Printer: A portrait in the nude”, Domus
In an interview with Domus, Jack Schulz of BERG describes the five-year design process for bringing the Little Printer to fruition. Unfortunately the Little Printer is no longer available.
Matt Webb, also of BERG, wrote an early blog post about the idea in 2006. He imagined it as a “social letterbox”, in which other people could print things directly to you, rather than simly emailing or uploading to a shared folder.
All of this points to a very different product from the present-day desktop printer. It could be done today–printer manufactures could bundle social letterbox software with their devices, just as digital camera manufacturers bundle photo management applications. But I think that’d be missing the point: the social interactions change the physical device itself.