BERG didn’t yet have the resources to produce one, so Matt Webb and
company built something else to indulge his scientific curiosity. In
2006 BERG debuted Availabot,
a voodoo-like figurine meant to represent a friend’s instant messenger
status. The figurine popped up when a designated friend signed online
and flopped down when they signed off. It was undeniably phallic and
humorous in nature, but it worked. “It’s tech that doesn’t feel
inhuman,” Webb says, “giving things character that represents a real
life behavior.” Only a handful of Availabot units were ever produced.

As Little Printer sits nearly completed, tightly enclosed in his
hands six years later, other ideas are already fluttering through his
head. “Wouldn’t it be awesome if when your phone was talking to the
network you could tell by observing tiny movements in the surface of the
phone?” Webb asked. He shows me the back of his iPhone and wiggles his
fingers around as he looks at me. “Then you could see when background
apps are doing something — it’s making things more legible by making
them physical,” he says. “It leads you down a form of design that’s more
human.” A BlackBerry LED light does not emote exuberantly enough for
Webb. He knew that unlike Microprinter, his printer would need to create
lasting value, and unlike an LED, would need to be very specific. “We
need to get back to where paper is something you want to keep in your
pocket or give to someone,” he says.

He cites a piece of twitching string as one of the main inspirations for Little Printer’s utility. Called “Live Wire,”
or simply “dangling string,” it hung from the ceiling at Xerox PARC
years ago, serving as a glanceable indicator for how congested the
company’s servers were at any given point. The string would twitch
frantically when the network was busy, and less so during off-peak
hours. PARC chief scientist at the time Mark Weiser called it calm technology.
“That’s all it did,” Webb says. “Everyone had this ambient awareness of
how busy things were. If the string is twitching and you’re trying to
download a file, perhaps you’ll leave the room and try again in a few
minutes.” The string represents a distracted boss that can’t respond
right now. As you approach his or her desk, a waving hand or furrowed
brow indicates that you might want to come back later. “It’s giving us a
new sense looking into the virtual world,” Webb says.

Inspired by the dangling string, Webb wrote a piece of software called Glancing
that sought to create a digital fifth sense for humans. Glancing was a
menu bar app for Mac with an eye for a logo, and depending on the status
of others near you, the eye might be open or closed. “It’s a
representation of how much people are looking around, but in a virtual
way,” Webb says. “In an office, if you look up and you see that
everyone’s looking around, you all get up and get coffee. All of that is
built on something simple: glancing and eye contact.” Webb’s
application evolved into a totem he frequently mentions, a symbol of his
desire to reproduce human behaviors digitally. “In cyberspace there’s
no visibility,” he complains. “Back in 2003 when I wrote this software,
there was this idea that you were present or not present. Nobody really
believes in offline anymore.”

Looking even further back, Webb told me about a prototype mobile answering machine
built in 1992 by Durrell Bishop, who is more recently a BERG
collaborator. Instead of interacting with an answering machine using
buttons, Bishop’s answering machine used marbles that each represented a
message. When a message was left for you, a marble would pop out of the
machine. You could put the marble in your pocket for later, or you
could drop the marble back into the machine to play your message.
“Bishop made an invisible and complex interface completely legible by
doing it with physical things,” Webb says. “We need to stop thinking
about the physical and digital as separate realms.”

Webb works on
the web, in print, and occasionally in Python, but with Little Printer,
he knew he’d have to get his hands dirty again with manufacturing. He
has drawn some inspiration from the Nest thermostat,
a personable piece of technology with analogous “smart appliance”
goals. “Knowing it’s going to be hot means it can handle home heating
differently” Webb says about the “learning thermostat.” Nest, like
Little Printer, seems to work effortlessly, but building hardware as a
small startup is difficult. “Most of the hardware talent has moved
offshore,” Nest founder Tony Fadell explained to Joshua Topolsky.
Only because of Fadell’s 25 years in the hardware space was he able to
secure funding and resources to take on Honeywell and other appliance
giants. “The time and effort involved in doing that with physical things
is prohibitive,” Webb says.

Figuring out injection-molding and building Little Printer from the
ground up proved a huge challenge. “We just ask people what to do and
experiment lots,” Webb says. It’s certainly helped that BERG resides in
London’s “Tech City,”
which provides the company with a large network of freelancers and
contractors to learn from. Also, BERG principals Matt Jones and Jack
Schulze had a bit of experience working at hardware companies — Nokia,
and RCA, respectively. “Availabot was a big learning process. It was
clear that one day we’d build a product we really wanted to make, and we
didn’t want that thing to be the thing we were learning on,” Webb says.
“‘Oh crikey! What if we manufactured it in this kind of way?'”

BERG spent months prototyping Little Printer, which is now about as
big as a stack of Post-it notes. “You need to see how it looks on a
table,” Webb says. “You have to get the clay under your fingernails to
figure out what the product wants to be.” Only after examining Little
Printer prototype units did the team at BERG realize that it needed to
tilt up, like a child grinning up at you. “The way Little Printer looks
accidentally refers to things we grew up with, like Playmobil, and even
the BBC Microcomputer
everyone had,” Webb says. He admires the cream and orange function keys
on the BBC Microcomputer, a sign of life in otherwise bland computers
of the time. “I like that Little Printer is not completely
simple,” Webb says. “The trend at the moment is devices that are frames
for content — frames that look like nothing, like stark black
rectangles.” He murmurs Apple and Samsung under his
breath. “The Nokia Lumia 800 has character. Little Printer isn’t just a
sleek print device. Character sets expectations for what something does,
and where it fits into your life,” Webb says. “You wouldn’t let a dog
into your house without knowing it had a dependable kind of character,
and the same is true with products.”