2024
Paper:Drive

Exploring paper as a medium to store and interact with digital data

Supervision
Prof. Tomek Ness, Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weißensee
Peter Sörries, Freie Universität Berlin
Hanna Wiesener, Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weißensee

Like no other medium, paper has contributed to preserving, organizing, and disseminating knowledge, information, and thoughts in human culture for more than 2,000 years. However, since the advent of computers around 1940, paper was increasingly displaced—especially with the rise of the Internet, where electronic data processing enabled the rapid distribution, searching, aggregation, and reconfiguration of information. Nonetheless, paper still proves its uniqueness in high practicality and long-term information preservation. Studies by the Federal Office for the Safety of Nuclear Waste Management (BASE) show that even typical recycling office paper and dry toner can last easily for 500 years.

In “Paper:Drive,” we explore paper as a medium to store and interact with digital data. We investigate how to design physical machines and digital processes to output, transfer, interact with, store, and read information within a novel explicit use case. We are questioning the primary use of paper in connection with the alphanumeric codes. These codes can only be used to a limited extent to transmit information. In addition to the interplay of paper as a material and symbol carrier, we will also examine the different human behaviors with paper and code and how these change depending on the context—private or public, individual or institutional.

Paper offers us many affordances, i.e., possibilities of use. The materiality of paper is well-known and understood within our society. There are plenty of cultural standards and behaviors that have evolved around paper. Furthermore, paper and printing/writing techniques are sophisticated, and above all, paper and printing techniques are widespread and readily available. Additionally, paper decreases manipulation and protects against data loss since text on paper cannot be as easily altered. Nevertheless, digital documents offer numerous affordances that paper does not. For example, they can be duplicated, searched, shared, modified, or deleted with much less effort. Due to these differences, we explore the following questions in this semester’s project: How can we combine the advantages of paper and digital systems? How can we synthesize these advantages into physical-digital interaction modalities that benefit human capabilities in information processing, storage, and sharing?

In the sense of physical-digital affordances, we will spark reflection on novel interaction concepts. More specifically, we will systematically investigate which interaction concepts at the interface between the virtual and the real world enable a particular paradigm or new technology. Starting from the aesthetics and rich possibilities of using paper, we stimulate various skills and work practices for processing information through haptic interactions by, for example, grasping, sensing, and manipulating them.

DesignFair

tba