Submitted: The Two Sides Team August 14, 2012
Inside the company that makes your life front page news, and the soulful gadget it designed to do the job.August 14, 2012
by Ellis Hamburger
The Verge
Matt Webb sips from a cup at Four Barrel Coffee in San Francisco, never
blinking. He pauses as his lips near the cup, trains his eyes on me, and
says, there will always be a place for disposable things. The
deceptively simple statements that come from his mouth sound like axioms
of design, or technology. He tells me the story of how he built Little Printer,
an internet-connected thermal printer for your home, but it sounds more
like the story of Jesus conception. Webb is boyishly handsome and
effervescent. He doesn’t seem to care much about money or competition or
IPOs. He cares about performing experiments on the way we experience
physical objects in a world where possessions are becoming increasingly
digital. “It’s pretty obvious that all your products will soon be
connected to the internet, but everything connected today is hidden
behind glass,” he says. Little Printer is the offspring of Webbs latest
experiment, up for pre-order today for $259 (£199).
Each morning Little Printer polls the web for information you
might’ve checked your smartphone’s home screen for. On one slip of
ordinary receipt paper, you can find friends’ birthdays from Facebook,
today’s weather, your to do list from Google Tasks, headlines from The Guardian,
a sudoku puzzle, and inspiring black and white photos of design firm
Arup’s most famous projects, like the Sydney Opera House. Little Printer
can be customized to print out friends’ locations on Foursquare each
Friday evening before you head out, and can even ping messages directly
to a friend’s Little Printer. With one button press, Little Printer
spits out a mini newspaper you’ve curated a slip of paper meant to
both evoke nostalgia and perhaps even some utility in place of our daily
mix of feeds, streams, updates, and messages.
Little Printer wasn’t made in a day, or even in a year. Seeds
germinated in Matt Webb’s head for almost a decade, only recently taking
shape as a physical object. Today he affectionately refers to Little
Printer as LP, a “family member” you can choose to welcome into your
home after years of gestation. The roots of the project lie in a blog
post Webb wrote in 2006 titled “The Social Letterbox,”
about a “desktop printer meets social software meets fax machine.”
UK-based engineer Tom Taylor took up Webb on his challenge and built the
Microprinter, calling it an “experiment in physical activity streams and notification.”
Microprinter was not much more than a repurposed receipt printer
connected to the weather and status updates. “We tried doing that and it
got dull quickly,” Webb says, who helped Taylor with the project. “On
paper you need a very high signal-to-noise ratio, since paper is
valuable. We’ve been trained by seeing receipts in shops so that we
imagine receipt paper as frivolous or can be discarded. When you look at
other paper in our lives, you only print out important things you want
to carry with you.” Webb decided that he would someday build a printer
of his own. It would print things he’d slip into his wallet or notebook
for scribbling on later, or for pinning on the fridge.
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.”
A couple “ambient devices” played an especially large role in the character and identity of Little Printer. One was Ambient Orb
which launched in 2002, a sphere that changed colors based on whether
the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up or down that day. Another was Nabaztag,
which launched in 2005, a rabbit-shaped device created by Rafi
Haladjian and Olivier Mével that wiggled its ears when you received
emails. “I can see what a chair or a flower pot can do. They look like
what they are,” Webb says. “But as soon as you connect something to the
internet, the big brain,’ it can do anything.”
You can customize Little Printer to print specific “publication”
modules once a week, daily, or at random. You can also choose the time
of day each publication will be delivered. For some publications like
the daily Sudoku puzzle, you can choose a difficulty level (between
Easy, Medium, and Hard). You can also choose to print only headlines
about specific topics in The Guardian publication settings. BERG
Cloud Remote is meant to help you organize all the snippets of
information you’d want on any given morning, but Webb prefers to mix
things up and print different publications on different days. “It can be
like an advent calendar,” he says. “You open a door, and you don’t know
what chocolate you’re going to get.”
BERG began by printing Facebook and Twitter feeds. “Noise is the
signal with Twitter and Facebook,” Webb says. “Just printing out updates
on Little Printer seemed to be missing the point. You need to do
interpretation with it.” While BERG had some ideas about the kinds of
media that fit on a 2-inch-wide roll of thermal paper, the company
needed some new inspiration. BERG hosted a hackday where 25 developers produced 73 new publications in the course of one day.
The publications varied greatly; one was a chart of what’s trending on
Twitter, and another was a daily dose of origami instruction you can do
at your desk. Yet another publication was a daily comic. And of course,
the “Cat Grinder” publication aggregated cute cat pictures and printed
them out.
Little Printer launches with four official partners (Google, Arup, Foursquare, and The Guardian),
but is designed to eat whatever content you can feed into it using a
dead simple API BERG is launching in beta. “Really, each publication is
just a 384 by 800 pixel black and white web page,” Webb says. “That’s
how easy it is to make a publication for this.” BERG offers a lengthy guide
(essentially an SDK) for publishers to use in creating publications,
with many tips on designing for thermal paper and abiding by the
company’s many design standards. Little Printer ships two months from
now in order to give developers ample time to create publications on the
platform. Publications from The Times (UK) and BBC are already in the works.
“For the moment there’s something so interesting about a mini newspaper,
so we are going down that path,” Webb says. He admits that printing a
tiny newspaper for yourself might not work in the long run, so he
designed BERG Cloud to be flexible and capable of powering anything from
connected watches to “smart infrastructure for a new city block.” Webb
would also love to someday automatically print coupons each day from
stores he likes. “People want ads!” he says as he laughs. “If I have a
relationship with a store, I’d want a coupon for that store. We can
create a form of advertising we really desire,” Webb says. Once again,
Little Printer is about scratching an itch in whatever way possible.
Fortunately, Little Printer’s brains are stored on the web, so updating
the hardware is more akin to pushing out code to a website.
As we prepared to leave Four Barrel Coffee after our first meeting,
Webb ripped off the Little Printer paper he’d been talking about and
handed it to me. As I savored my pre-launch artifact, I glanced back at
Little Printer and noticed that it was Little Printer no more. De-faced,
Little Printer is just an odd-looking box with orange legs and a black
button on top. I couldn’t help but notice Webb’s incredibly scuffed and
scratched black polycarbonate MacBook. He says, “I used to have an
11-inch MacBook Air, but I was burgled. Shenanigans.”
There’s no doubt Webb’s house is filled with things, unlike
many of the homes you find in today’s architecture magazines and Tumblr
blogs barren and sterile museum homes that put minimalism first. He
exclaims, “It feels like a blip to be in this world full of squares of
glowing glass, and it doesn’t seem plausible that we’ll have that
forever.” For many of us, Little Printer might be nothing more than the Game Boy Printer
Nintendo stopped producing, but to Matt Webb, it’s the sum of years of
hypothesizing and tinkering and experimenting. Ultimately, he may have
built it for himself. “Money is an important thing, a good proxy for
telling whether what you’re doing is liked or important,” he says. “But
it’s a bothersome service for a designer.” Little Printer could very
well become the first massively popular “ambient device,” or it might
end up behind glass at the MoMA. Either way we’ll have learned something
from BERG, which stands for the British Experimental Rocket Group. BERG
is exploring whether there’s space in our lives for media that refuse
to be swiped or pinched and zoomed. “There is so much to be gained from
doing stuff physically,” Webb insists. “The fidelity of analog is not to
be fetishized!”