After Aaron's talk, Tom Taylor gave a little spiel about his microprinter, a standard till printer hooked up to the internet to print whatever you command it to, which in Tom's case are things like his daily calendar, weather reports, and @towerbridge opening times to help him plan his cycling route. Nifty! The notes for his talk came off the printer as he was talking, which was cute. It's one of those things that could potentially be quite useful, at least for short bursts of information that you might want to carry around. As he said, "if blogs are A4-sized, this is Twitter-sized." The next thing would be for someone to hack one of these so that it could print small images as well, but I'm not sure that's even possible. Would be cool, though.
Following that, Alex Deschamps-Sonsino gave a fun workshop on Thinking Through Paper, encouraging us to think in 3D, and to think about how to build ideas into objects. She asked us to remember the last thing we'd made with paper (which was easy in my case, being the contact-info cards I'd made the night before). She also had a couple of interesting things to say before we started the hands-on participation, including a horrifying anecdote of teaching a class of 16-20 year olds how to make paper airplanes. Apparently none of them had ever made one before, and took so long to be convinced that she had to download plans off the internet before they would even try! No, really, that horrifies me. What kind of culturally deprived lives had these people been living?
Alex expounded on how this fear of the blank page can be damaging to the creative process, talking about different attitudes to "old" paper versus "new" paper. If paper is already printed on, it can often be an invitation to use it for something else (e.g. cards etc.) whereas a pristine blank page can be quite scary. I understand this "fear of the blank page" myself; every time I get a new notebook, I struggle to think of something worthwhile to put on the first page, and frequently start using it a few pages in, or sometimes right in the middle of the book — as I happened to do with my notes from Saturday's sessions. (Although, to be fair, my new notebook does have different sections, and I chose a specific one for taking notes.)
During this session, we also heard from Giles Lane of Proboscis Studios, who have been producing Diffusion Shareables; e-books and StoryCubes that you can customise and download. (Not to always bring it back to the comics thing, but while he was talking about this I was reminded of a cube-shaped minicomic about a box that Sally-Anne Hickman made a couple years ago, utilising the box shape to parallel her story.) Watching Giles demonstrate the idea of using the cubes as building blocks to create a larger story, I was also reminded of the pizza-box comic that some of us made at Caption in 2003.)
Inspired by a product design workshop she'd taken at college, Alex challenged us to make either a chair, a building, or something we liked; an activity we all dived into with great enthusiasm. Despite only having ten minutes to come up with something, there were some great designs at the end of it, and it's a shame that no one took photos of them all (but I think some of them were captured for posterity). I made a bracelet from scraps of yellow paper linked together with yellow paperclips, each scrap printed with "PAPERCAMP 09″ on both sides, using a nifty little moveable type rubber printing set provided by Matt. (I so want to buy one for myself now!). As I commented to Tom Taylor when we sat back down for the next presentation, "you know it's been a good morning when your hands are covered in printers' ink before midday!"
