Paper Bits

Feb 24

Barcodes and Beer Mats

I am extremely excited about the possibilities inherent in printable, phone-readable codes like QR Codes.

And constantly appalled by the way they are being used.

The sad thing is, we saw this coming. Aaron Straup Cope on barcodes in 2007:

Wow!

It’s a good thing I only have to wait until March 2007 to have my every need fulfilled. In a barco…I mean, a beer-mat. My problem with this scenario is not that I, in the course of the last few paragraphs, have suddenly decided that barcodes are a tool of the Man designed to commodif…I mean, fulfill my every need. Rather that the opportunity to do something useful and exciting is being crushed by the same kind of dumb, lazy and greedy lack of imagination that gave the world WAP.

Emphasis mine.

Feb 21

qrtreasure:

QR Treasure #72: Travel map gets QR bombed.

For once, a good use for QR codes.

The QR is a kind of URL mystery meat: you can’t tell what it is or what it will do until you scan it. It’s as illegible and fragile as a shortened URL, with the added inconvenience that it requires specialized software.

On the other hand, the QR’s opacity is a kind of affordance for mystery. Which makes them a good candidate for treasure maps and similar kinds of experiences.

Clever.

(via fuckyeahcartography)

Dec 8

QRapping Paper™ — Home

Hard to believe this isn’t a joke. From the name to the ad copy, the entire thing seems like self-mockery.

Even terrible gifts are worth opening when they’re wrapped in QRAPPING PAPER™ the world’s most interactive wrapping paper

Words fail.

Nov 5

Incidental Media Surfaces - The Journey and Papernet Protospimes

BERG London, Timo Arnall, and Dentsu London produced two films on “alternative futures” for media. They’re short, well-edited, and thoughtful.

Media surfaces: Incidental Media

The first video suggests a rich set of non-interruptive ways to display contextual data. To gracefully, “ignorably” present information that can be glanced at.

In contrast to a Minority Report future of aggressive messages competing for a conspicuously finite attention, these sketches show a landscape of ignorable surfaces capitalising on their context, timing and your history to quietly play and present in the corners of our lives.

Compare the presence of a clock dial or barometer —silent, present, non-intrusive— with the chiming barrage of pop-up notification windows on the iPhone. The one asks nothing of you, while the other practically demands an intervention.

(“OH HI! YOU WEREN’T DOING ANYTHING, RIGHT? SOMEONE JUST TOLD YOU ‘LOL’ ON TWITTER ISN’T THAT GREAT?! OK CANCEL”)

Media Surfaces suggests that our choice is not between abstention from social media or surrender to constant intrusion. Instead, we can make thoughtful choices about how and where to present timely, relevant, ignorable (again) messages.

One presentation medium is print, in the form of a microprinter.

This sequence shows a common receipt from a coffee shop and explores what happens when we treat print as a highly flexible, context-sensitive, connected surface, and super quick by contrast to say video in broadcast.

I couldn’t get the QRCode on the receipt to scan, and so am left to wonder what you might use it for in this context. Would it let you “check in” to a location-based site? Search for geotagged photos nearby? Could you easily take one and add it to the set?

The next video focuses on a train journey, and the opportunities to provide glance-able information in order to make the experience calmer and more satisfactory.

Media surfaces: The Journey

Like the first, it is short and well worth watching.

Naturally, one part that made me smile with pure joy involved the use of a ticket printer.

…looking at all the printed ephemera around us and how it can be treated as a media surface for more personalised, contextualised or rapidly-updated information.

After all, most of the printed matter associated with a train journey is truly print-on-demand…

Given an awareness of the time-table of the train ride, and the geography of the country traveled through, BERG create a kind of non-digital, printed augmented reality with ticket stubs:

We know that we’re going to be passing certain places at certain times, to some accuracy, during our journey.

The burgeoning amount of geo-located data about our environment means we could look to provide snippets from Wikipedia perhaps, with timings based on how they intersect with your predicted journey time – alerting you to interesting sights just as they pass by your window.

Think of how humane a medium this is. I’d love to see more exploration of opportunities for bionic noticing while keeping your phone in your pocket and your attention out of a tiny screen.

I wonder if we could somehow entice Matt or anyone else from the BERG crew to Boston for a PaperCamp…

Oct 30

kevintwohy:

Dom Pérignon’s Andy Warhol tribute champagne is being released world wide this week and the news is that in Japan each bottle will have a designer QR Code.

Pretty, but really, what need of mine does this solve?

Oct 27

Thingiverse really needs to fix their mobile stylesheet.

When it renders images, they push the text to the side. Combined with the fixed viewport, this means all text is truncated.

This screenshot is what you get when you scan the QRCode that’s embedded in the parametric printable box.

[Edit]

Zach “Hoeken” from Thingiverse kindly responded to my bug report; he’s promised to try and fix the issue.

Desktop QR Code Reader | dansl

Based on Adobe Air; cross platform, and simple, but its image recognition is poor. You have to beat the application over the head with a barcode before it’s recognized.

Still, better than nothing.

3D Printer Alchemy - MakerBot Industries

A little over a month ago I had pondered how cool it would be to have things on Thingiverse embedded with QR codes – so you could show the bottom of the object to a friend, they could grab the digital file, and print off a duplicate. Well, l0b0 has done just that with his parametric box!

@benosteen has inspired me to play with a microprinter.

Source Code here.

Oct 15

Current score: 2 out of 3.

Not bad.