At the Lift offices, we now print (yes, on paper) different pieces of personal informatics such as our Dopplr sheets of trips. As we are often in and out our physical offices, collocated colleagues and friends who swing by can access this a sort location-awareness board that is both accessible on the web (if connected to us through Dopplr) and on our office door. Information about our perambulations when traveling to different locations for field trips, vacations, conference visits, client meetings and stuff are then made accessible through two modalities: being connected through the interwebs AND coming physically to our offices (in addition, it also necessitates to know where our offices are located, which is not obvious).

What's next? perhaps a colleague will start adding post-it notes or drawing graffitis on the paper sheets, that would be an interesting.

Why do I blog this? Quite rough and paper-based, this example makes me think about the ways one can rethink non-computer based practices by adding rationale coming from software/web services design. The unbook is another example of such idea as it corresponds to the idea of re-injecting ideas from the digital sphere (e.g. the release early/often trope, the community-based model). As a matter of fact, translating ideas from the digital to the physical is perhaps not always interesting as it may embeds logics and underlying hypotheses that can be irrelevant (I wouldn't be that interested in translating productivity software/widget out of my laptop) but there could be curious and original design endeavor.

Of course the example above is flawed given that the Dopplr webpage is not really meant to be printed on paper and stuck on a wall; it's definitely a trick but uh it can be a good start. And it leads me to think about what would be a good asynchronous and paper-based location-aware device? shareable with friends? with a certain level of errors about my future whereabouts?