"Another aspect of contemporary screen-based culture is the constant psychic conflict often referred to as the "Attention Economy". In just trying to watch one youtube video, a typical user is confronted with dozens of other appeals to focus somewhere else: comments, ratings, related videos, advertisements, video responses, etc. Because screen-based interaction is premised on temporal immediacy, we are, as users forced into a state of hyper-attention where we must constantly fight against the, largely commercial, attempts to make us look at something else. When we remove the screen (and by necessity, simplify the interface) we introduce a new form of temporality, where the speed of interaction might more accurately reflect our ability to percieve and understand information."
I think this is the important part of the whole idea.
On the other hand, and, in my opinion, you can achieve a similar experience as:
1. use a laptop and/or desktop
2. disable your notification system on your desktop
3. browse the web with an extremely simple browser, like w3m
4. one display
5. full-screen mode
6. don't scroll gradually; read from top to bottom and use pgup/pgdown
I found this the best way to focus on content and work, however, most workplaces won't tolerate not responding to instant messages and notifications.
"Slack and friends" was meant to mean "Slack, Hipchat, Lync, and other similar office instant messaging applications," if you somehow thought I was blaming the recent development of human friendship for our woes.
Before Slack, the same stuff happened in IM. Slack hasn't added any significant noise in my day-to-day (with the exception of my phone, where I never installed IM clients but have chosen to install Slack).
Yes, in the same way that we have lost the ability to imagine a workplace without email or phones. Once you give people an efficient means of communication, it doesn't really go away. Skype for Business and its predecessors have been around for 10 years. I know Yahoo used IM internally for much longer than that and I'm sure many other companies did as well.
I actually don't think that IM is a net positive for me. The channel support in Slack/Teams/Stride is.
> I actually don't think that IM is a net positive for me. The channel support in Slack/Teams/Stride is.
Yep. No problems with dedicated phone number, dedicated im address, dedicated email, etc. Group chats, group discussions, mailing lists, git commit messages, wiki edits, etc - those are the ones that can be very hard to follow, especially if you're involved in many.
IM has to be proactively set up by the organization so it would indeed "go away" if you just didn't have it. And it's less than clear to me that the ease of interrupting someone to send them a message should have such a high priority.
Yes, it's the one where you spend more time in meetings, having people come up to your desk, phonecalls, etc.
People focusing full-time on the task at hand is an illusion and always has been; if it was real, it'd be bleak, depressing and more like forced labor / code monkeying than an ideal. There's a few people that can do it and actually enjoy it, but I'm fairly sure the vast majority would go mad.
> most workplaces won't tolerate not responding to instant messages and notifications.
This. IM conversations take longer than in person ones (or video chats), have a higher rate of misunderstandings, cannot be flagged for follow up or bookmarked for reference, and the red blobs contribute to higher stress levels. It adds nothing to productivity, IMO. Yet being ‘present’ on slack is the new being at your desk before the boss.
My experience has been different. Things like slack have actually increased my ability to focus and get things done. My SLA for responding to slack is 2 hours, I can't focus on any one task for longer than that. Every two hours of so I check messages and respond then. It's great, it's far more relevant and filtered than email is and it isn't people showing up at my desk every 5 minutes.
Huh? More filtered than email? Where in most cases you used to have sieve level server side filters and any kind of filter on the client side (in the real, desktop email clients era)?
The capabilities of email filtering have been diminishing for many years, so I may even believe this is becoming true these days, but it certainly is shocking.
Not the person to whom you're responding, but my work email includes many messages from people who don't work for my company, while my Slack client doesn't. Not all of the Slack messages are relevant, but they are all more relevant than messages from outsiders.
email includes all sorts of low priority or informational only messages that don't need to be addressed quickly. Chat is things that are high priority but not urgent. They can be safely ignored for a few hours. Urgent is a phone call or sneaker net. When I get people that think chat is for urgent I educate them but most people in the city I live already understand that urgent requires a voice or face to face to reduce any ambiguity. This is nothing like filtering email. You'd never use email if you expect a reply quickly unless it were paired with a visit.
CPPGrey did it for a while with an iPad Pro setup with no apps except work and with no internet in a lone office. I rhink that could work for some types of tasks.
I find it hard to focus on just one thing, or do just one thing (like write without also listening to music, or having a long phonecall without fiddling or driving); not sure if that's something I should work on or accept as being part of my personality by now. It doesn't seem to have any major problems.
I'm quite the opposite, I struggle to truly multitask, but some of my co-workers seem to focus better when they have a YouTube video off to one side. Each person is different, and it doesn't matter all that much as long as the work gets done.
Disabling slack notifications other than direct messages is such a game changer. The constant notifications due to slack on some of my coworker's screens seem so distracting I don't know how they get anything done. I also have mostly all notifications on my iphone turned off.
While upgrading my Slackware current installation on an old recycled laptop, I decided to install Alien Bob's KDE5 package set for lutz (works well on a humble core-duo with 2Gb RAM). The readme advises installing outside of X, so I was sitting at a console for 45 mins while the packages downloaded and installed. Bored, I found myself hitting Ctrl-Alt-2 and Ctrl-Alt-3 to run w3m and mpg123 in different virtual ttys. Reading and Music. Around 60% of my normal laptop use cases covered there and then.
Posting this on Debian command line with the evilwm and Firefox. No notifications, quiet, minimal.
> don't scroll gradually; read from top to bottom and use pgup/pgdown
Am I just spoiled by smooth scrolling on all my devices, or is this hard to do for anyone else? For whatever reason, any "jerky" scrolling (e.g. using the arrow keys, page up/page down, "two finger scrolling" on laptops with bad drivers) just messes with my reading. I think the issue is that I don't like the feeling of text disappearing and reappearing somewhere else–I want my actions to control where the text is going fully so I don't have to re-track it with my eyes.
I thought the same until i was stuck working on the CLI for some time.
Give yourself an afternoon, i quickly adapted and now peruse the web mouseless fulltime; once your eyes know where to jump it becomes a lot easier to read and to focus, your eyes don't have to readjust as often and reading web pages becomes more book-like.
More than Pgup/Pgdown i find Spacebar and Home to be my most common choices for scrolling.
Not to take away from what is being done in this project, but I had to read the HN comments to figure out that this was a set of software for printers.
The project could really use some better copy on the landing page.
80% of the product announcements posted here are greeted with “the landing page needs better copy, I couldn’t figure out what it’s supposed to do.”
So, while I agree with you, it really doesn’t undermine OP at all. Especially as it’s common to see people get value from that response; we see creators quite often personally respond with “oh, crap, I didn’t realize, let me work on that.”
I've always taken "OP" to mean "Original Poster" or "Original Parent" -- similar "GP" is often used to mean "Grandparent Poster", as in the post whose reply we are replying to. :)
idk if this was updated but i figured this out from the landing page in ~10secs. It's in sentence 3-4 on the page. If you're not reading the copy but instead comments only why complain about the landing page
I've read the copy on the site, the comments here, then went through to the code repository, and still don't really know what this project is or what its meant to do.
> It is constructed using free/libre/open hard- and software components, especially for print, databases, web-scraping and tangible interaction.
> Currently, it exists as a working prototype with software "bureaus" which allow a user to read and navigate news, web sites and social media entirely with the use of various printers for output and a barcode scanner for input.
That's really not clear. Also, your "if you're not reading the copy but instead comments" thing was both snarky and incorrect. Both are fine, but it's not recommended to be both disagreeable and wrong at the same time.
What part of "read and navigate news" and "printers for output and barcode scanners for input" isn't absolutely crystal clear? It fully and clearly explains what the system can do and how you interact with it. Do you not know what printers are? Barcode scanners? News?
Because it explains the mechanics but not the intent. Once you intuit the intent by reading more, you can go back and read the mechanics and get it. But in general, it's hard for readers who have no context to pull intent from mechanics. It also helps to acknowledge up front what's different, rather than first presenting the abstraction for that difference ("bureaus"). Something like: The intent of our project is to remove screens from modern computers. We explore presenting information only through physical printouts, and input only through barcode scanners.
"Another aspect of contemporary screen-based culture is the constant psychic conflict often referred to as the 'Attention Economy'. In just trying to watch one YouTube video, a typical user is confronted with dozens of other appeals to focus somewhere else: comments, ratings, related videos, advertisements, video responses, etc. Because screen-based interaction is premised on temporal immediacy, we are, as users forced into a state of hyper-attention where we must constantly fight against the, largely commercial, attempts to make us look at something else. When we remove the screen (and by necessity, simplify the interface) we introduce a new form of temporality, where the speed of interaction might more accurately reflect our ability to perceive and understand information."
This kind of writing is not generally accessible so it's unclear and takes more effort to parse than more simplified language.
For example:
Because screen-based interaction is premised on temporal immediacy, we are, as users forced into a state of hyper-attention where we must constantly fight against the, largely commercial, attempts to make us look at something else
While I personally like the way this sentence is written, and is similar to my natural writing style, it's not easy to parse.
It could have as easily been written as:
"For most people, the time they spend on the computer is littered with distractions, and intentionally so, as corporations want to capture your attention by suggesting another video, viewing more content or offering a shiny ad."
You keep the emotion and information (lossy), but make it easier to read.
It's quite obvious that the landing page _isn't_ clear to a lot of people (including me). If you understood it with perfect clarity, good for you! Why not help explain it for others instead of being snarky?
I am interested in everyone’s initial (and resulting) imagined depictions of what this is/looks like. I’m not sure how you can share this with me. Maybe they don’t even vary much.
My own depiction figures a slew of packing-taped barcodes on the tables and walls serve as references (links, shortcuts, scripts). So, the worst part is probably that organization abstractions are only accessible through the printer... a very slow command line... could be worse. But, I haven’t a clue how any of this stuff is developed without screens.
I keep trying to imagine what they're describing and every single possibility seems AWFUL and INFLEXIBLE.
The landing page isn't helping their cause. The "slow food" concept works great for food, but sorry, it just doesn't translate to "slow computing."
Looking a bit closer, this seems to be a design challenge/experiment. Not intended to be practical, but more like a provocative exercise in new possibilities. I actually like it. It is good to try-on half baked ideas sometimes.
I think it does. If you can remember the Macintosh before the days of the MultiFinder, you ran one application at a time. The interface was simple, and you had to focus on the task at hand. Distractions were limited to any Desk Accessories you might have.
Ok, you did have a screen, but I think it is a good analogue to the Slow Food concept and has its own advantages over the interfaces we use today.
Because "software for printers" is actually not what this is.
It is an art project, an "artistic operating system", originally an assignment for design students, possibly a cruel joke, a "statement".
It's a peculiar failure of comprehension to look at all of that, wonder what it is, then find the software part and come back to the software developer website to report that it is "a set of software for printers".
Like a textile specialist staring at a painting for days, not getting it, then finally looking at the back side and, relieved, going back to report to the Textile News readership that it's a linen canvas, stretched and decorated on one side.
...and then suggesting they really should mount it on the wall the other way so people can more easily see what it is.
"Artistic operating system?" It says that they created software to interface with networked computers without a screen. Why is that "artistic" and not receptive to the same criticisms that normal technology is.
I for one think it's extremely unfortunate that no one bothered to tell them what a Telex was.... Could have saved the team a lot of trouble.
You're spectacularly (and snarkily) missing the point.
It's artistic because it's designed to make you think about different ways of interacting with technology. It is a choice to build a system under imposed constraints, which the Telex obviously was not.
I'm seeing tons of comments about this thing being wasteful or impractical, as if these weren't specifically discussed in the source material. They were. They know. Here's their statement from the "Why" page:
By calling this creation an "Artistic Operating System",
we assert that it should be unique and personal, even
peculiar in its way of representing and interfacing with
the rest of the media world. In this sense, it is freed
from the implicit social requirement that new
technological projects conform to standard principles of
progress, universality and efficiency. There's no need
to claim to be the "Next Big Thing" or to even suggest
that anyone, other than the creators of this device,
should use it. However, its existence serves as a
polemic for a more diverse, inclusive and participatory
interface culture where new technological systems might
be judged for their poetic qualities instead of
marketability.
I'm not sure I know what you mean by "usefulness". I know that sounds weird, but they say they're not aiming to meet "standard principles of progress, universality and efficiency". So it sounds to me like the emotional/psychological impact on the user may be a higher priority for them than "good old fashioned productivity".
The statement assumes that one considers the poetic qualities as significant as marketability - not useful. You seem to have misunderstood the creators' intentions as they have no interest in providing you a "practical demonstration" or anything practical at all.
Art has little direct use - Michelangelo's David has very little practical value, yet it's significance is immense.
The creators of this project do not care for the practical value of any of this. They wish to experiment in the hope that some poetic qualities of their work will be deemed significant enough to carry on into new works (some of which may actually be useful).
We can't comment on art? Can't lament its waste and implied value of the environment? Can't make suggestions on how a greater impact could be made (even if only to the commenter) with a few small tweaks, while still keeping the core values in place?
Sorry if it seems a bit snarky, but art is open to criticisms and critiques.
You can do of the above. Indeed, you personally did some of the above! Thanks! But many just came in and posted about it being wasteful and impractical, apparently unaware that the source material had already readily admitted as much about itself. To me, those comments don't add much to the conversation.
> Our perception of the world around us and how we see ourselves in, it is mediated by the decisions of a few privileged managers, programmers and designers[...]. To suggest any other way of living in a networked society is to risk being percieved as blasphemous, uncool, out-of-touch, escapist or simply absurd. These interfaces have become so embedded in our conception of reality that we now have a crisis of the imagination, where it is difficult to even think of anything different.
I think that we are indeed losing computing diversity. Even something as boring as an Emacs-based computing experience (i.e. doing everything in Emacs) is often considered other-wordly or out-of-touch. Not having (and not wanting) a "smartphone" is another thing that is often responded to as almost unthinkable.
One small piece of this has reignited my desire to build something similar to the BERG Tiny Printer [1]. My only issue with such a thing is that I don't want to use thermal paper.. or any paper if I can avoid it.
Going forward, I think there may be a market for a small eink tablet (~4.5" or so) that presents curated news, articles, etc -- something ideal for commuting by bus, plane, or any other passive time without loads of animated ads, popups for newsletters, and absolutely nothing 'social.' This leads me toward a desire for proper epub releases for magazines like The New Yorker and stuff that could scale to a smaller screen.
Services like Zinio [2], which most libraries provide, would be an excellent tie-in for a small device like this.
You could probably hack something very simple together with a kindle + email. Construct an ebook of top stories / headlines and email it to your kindle account, all the syncing/etc is then handled for you.
It does, but having used it, it's a real nuisance to clean up on a Kindle reader. You have to go through Amazon's web page to clean up the used articles, and its a bit of a pain.
A very cool feature, but ultimately not very practical.
Especially since e-ink works in direct sunlight and progress on sunlight readable screens seems to have ground to a halt at the Pixel QI.
I would pay for a decent sized e-ink screen with a stripped down browser that could integrate with a desktop bookmark app and save content for later reading. Not this "experimental" browser in my Kindle.
The only issue I see is typing fast could get frustrating given what I experience just typing on my kindle. Though maybe the applications and user habits would adapt around it to limit keystrokes and be more efficient.
Or they'd just attach a small digital output screen akin to those old typing machines that you'd then push to the main screen when done. Still wouldn't use much of the battery at least, but would look ugly.
the main issue is the refresh rate. A while ago there was a kickstarter for the Hemingwrite [1] which looked to be heading down the right path.
It's surprising to me that the Yota phone [2] design didn't catch on. Having both a normal screen and an eink screen would be a killer feature, since most of what I do with my phone is text based and doesn't require any color.
E-ink would actually be a pretty neat practical version of this kind of stuff. You get the relatively static display geared towards focus, without all the waste of printing out paper. I've felt like it's a really under-utilized technology. I know it's used in some displays for advertisements and information, but more research into it could bear a lot of fruit in low-energy-consuming electronics that don't use constant input. I'd love to see more software geared towards its use (and to be honest this thread is kind of inspiring me to go off and develop something) and more personal devices that use it. Especially when we're talking about environmentally conscious design, I don't think you're gonna get a more low-energy display than that. Hell, even the paper printing probably uses more energy.
This is, of course, a response to the "paperless" movement. The trouble is that the movement away from paper and toward digital can be about more than the capitalist drive for efficiency.
One of the words the author used was "universality". For me, that has a moral component as well. Consider that information stored in a digital textual encoding is universally accessible. For example, blind people can read it through text-to-speech or a refreshable Braille display. Text-to-speech is also useful for people who have trouble reading due to cognitive disabilities.
So, print things out for your own consumption if you like, but please don't require others to consume information in that form. And, insofar as "the _________ office" refers to a group environment, I think the best word to fill in that blank is "universal" or "inclusive".
BTW, when I heard "screenless", I imagined an office full of people using speech synthesizers as blind people do. In the blind community, "screenless" refers to a talking device with no screen (very often a device made specifically for blind people that lags behind the mainstream, but that's another story).
While I agree with your sentiment, I would argue that translating digital information for physical consumption (paper, e-ink, etc.) does lead to improved access for people with disability.
Digital textual encoding is only universally accessible if the context it is situated within is also textually encoded. The lack of context (i.e., poor accessibility compliance) across digital mediums is the single largest inhibitor for the visually impaired community. Once digital information is prepared for print, the source of output is simply a matter of changing peripherals (printer, braille embosser, braille display, text-to-speech).
The authors may not have intended to directly address the needs of disability, but I do not think that their use of "universality" is misplaced. We should applaud any effort that encourages society to think beyond the constraints of the graphical interface.
I’ve been meaning to put together a music player for my kids that uses one of: qr codes, bar codes, or NFC tags to select the music to play (no screen). The first two having surprisingly expensive readers (you can buy a crappy smartphone for the price of a dedicated usb always-on auto barcode or qr code scanner, and cheap webcams can’t focus correctly for the job of close-up code reading) and the latter confusing the hell out of me for any option that doesn’t use really expensive hobbyist-targeted tags ($0.50/tag or higher) have kept me from going beyond the googling phase.
One of the things I really miss with electronic book/music collection is the cover art: many of them are scary, unique, atmospheric, beautiful, and very much a living part of the album itself.
E-ink devices are brilliant things, but had I encountered Dragonlance without Elmore's paintings - or only in black & white - they may not have made the impression they did.
So a collection with large, good quality cover art, combined with qr codes that enables/plays/downloads the relevant book/album to your device is a pretty neat idea.
I had a similar idea. Since we have a lot of old Disney films on VHS, I would like to be able to put the box in a place and have the system and play back the HD version from my media center. I investigated RFID/NFC tags, but what would also be cool would be a kind of ultra flat scanner.
I imagine something purely optical, with no moving parts. You have a glass plate, maybe a few cm high, that you put the object to be scanned on, and the light is reflected into the plate on to a small CCD sensor hidden on the side or somewhere else. It doesn't have to have a great resolution, just enough to distinguish different movies. I tried googling, but it seems something like that doesn't exist (probably the achievable resolution is too bad for real world usage).
Its a bit unfortunate, I'd like to bring back a bit of physicality to my computer interactions.
I'm trying to avoid a barcode reader "gun", or hanging a barcode reader from a cantilever. Ideally, I just want a flat platform, or something that can hold the box.
I'm pretty sure it should be possible to make a waveguide from properly shaped plexiglas and mirrors, so that you can hide a sensor below or in the side, and have it focused on the plexiglas surface. However, I can't figure out the geometry.
I guess if I actually built the project, the RFID tags would be the best option.
That makes sense. I agree that RFID is probably the way to go. What I was thinking of was closer to what you are describing though, or to a supermarket style in-counter barcode reader. I don't know if there's a minimum barcode-to-reader distance, but I suspect you could hack something up by building a box around one of these types* of readers.
Another downside to the barcode approach is also that it requires correct alignment. Maybe you can get greater convenience from RFID.
On the other hand, the RFID approach means you don't have to modify the boxes at all. Because the code should hold some semantic meaning, you could maybe even set it up to download the requested movie on demand, so that you don't have to build your own database...
I've had the idea since the early 00's to build "Dial M for MP3." This would have a rotary dial interface to a jukebox-style playlist on a printed card.
"The Screenless Office is a system for working with media and networks without using a pixel-based display."
Oh boy... I miss the sound of teletypes, typewriters and, of course, vector based displays ;-)
No, seriously, I miss all those things... I'd kill (no, not really, but close) for a CDC 6600 console, a Tektronix calligraphic display terminal or an IBM 2250.
Sometimes a TTY appears. IBM Selectrics are easy to find. CDC and Tektronix stuff is much harder/borderline impossible. Building a vector CRT like the CDC and the 2250 is a major engineering undertaking these days and I don't even want to start what would it take to build a storage tube like Tek had.
I think a x,y display can be built off a CRT that miraculously escaped recycling and, by modulating RGB cannons, you may even get color vectors for free.
I'd love to do such a project, but the analog parts are way above my head. Haven't touched that since college.
I've found workflows with my reMarkable tablet that allow me to spend less time in front of a screen. I find getting away from my workstation to go think is immensely valuable. With my org-based publishing system I can put code, diagrams, and documents that render to PDF and sync to the device which allows me to "go offline" for a bit and edit, reflect, and remix those thoughts.
It's not quite as extreme as Screenless but I'm totally down with the message.
I'd like for my reMarkable to eventually be more capable of uploading my gestures to my server where I'm running recognition software that can talk to my compilers, theorem provers, etc and send me back more information.
I'd like to work in a space where the devices and artifacts surrounding me are more intuitive and conducive to the way I think rather than blending myself in with the way someone else designed the experience of thinking for me.
That said, the wastefullness of it doesn't appeal to me, though some of the ideas behind it do. I would think an adaptation of a e-ink display would be much more practical and much less wasteful, while conveying similar meaning.
I don't disagree with you, it is impractical. But the whole point of the project is to challenge the exact tech conventions that lead one to conclude that it's impractical. So while I agree with you, saying "it's impractical" seems to miss the point.
I appreciate a whole host of conceptual, provocative, performance, and abstract art. I even enjoyed the frisson of the idea of the famous goldfish-in-the-blender. But I have difficulty assigning an actual cognitive validity to this project. It’s probably just me.
Judging by the readily quantifiable responses on HN expressing disapproval, I definitely don't believe it's "just you". As far as "cognitive validity" is concerned, the closest you'll get to an answer from the author is their "Why Screenless" section. But you may still be left in "agree to disagree" territory with them.
This is really beautiful. I love the idea of designing interfaces that pinch off the flow of information just a bit so our attention can’t be forced to jump around as fast.
I work as a software developer, I don't think I can really get away from having a screen as the central fixture on my desk. That said, for those whose work is not so centrally fixed around computing, elevating a monitor to the most central location on their desk strikes me as far less helpful.
My partner works works with college students, they are a counselor and adviser; meeting with students is the primary focus of their work. I was surprised to see, however, that the computer and display was still a big part of their desk. They have one of those L-shaped workstations with the front portion cleared so they can talk to students and the wall-side dominated by the computer's display.
Does the screen need to dominate their workspace? What sort of constant attention drain does the display represent on them and the students? I also believe it leads to unreasonable work performance related expectations, namely that they are entirely up-to-date on the most recent received email messages and memos, etc. Most of their time is spent working with students, the computerized portion of their work is mostly in the morning, brief snippets in between appointments and the end of the day.
This "screenless" idea seems somewhat extreme, but perhaps having the computing device in a clearly diminutive form-factor would go a long way towards changing their relationship with the machine, as well as expectations for how much time they spend reading email, memos, etc. I definitely think it's worth exploring.
In my opinion, the "open" office plans seem the most extreme version of this idea that the computing device should be central to one's workspace (and by extension, one's work). In some of these plans, there's almost no personal space at all, certainly no room for decoration or personal touches. On the contrary, the entire space is defined by the computer.
I am surrounded by books I hardly ever read, because I can get instant access to information without moving, thanks to my screen. But there are problems: 1) my screen also gives me instant access to an amazing vastness of distractions, and 2) the quality of information in the books around me is often much higher than the quality of information I can get instantly. But because of 1), I don't appreciate 2).
I think it would be interesting to experience a screenless office. Obviously I would think more deeply about things. Some of that thought would be "wasted," in the sense that I would be working things out I could simply look up on Stack Overflow. But I think there is a cognitive difference between working something out yourself and copying someone else's answer. In the former case, it feels like you are sort of exercising your own capacity to think, and in the latter case you can remain somewhat disengaged. The former is like walking a path, the latter is like watching a video of someone else walking it.
While paper is a renewable resource, this project is more of a thought experiment. Are we happy with the way we have become dependent on screens for computing? Every technology brings some tradeoffs—are we happy with the tradeoffs we are implicitly accepting? If not, what are we willing accept in return for change?
Very interesting to see how this turns out for artists.
From one side, there are studies that show that brief interruptions boost the brain searching for creative solutions.
From another side, nothing gets done because FB, Reddit, cats and the likes tend to pull one in longer than expected. If somebody interupts you they go away after the issue, social media is there with another item forever.
Maybe we are seeing something fundamentally new, coming slowly with this idea?
> Currently, it exists as a working prototype with software "bureaus" which allow a user to read and navigate news, web sites and social media entirely with the use of various printers for output and a barcode scanner for input.
I love the idea of having more ways to interact with computers/the internet. Pixels have been great, but I’d suggest technology based on them won’t ever fully hit a true “new phase” until much more can be done without pixels.
I sense a you didn’t read the post / don’t know what Luddites were.
Put less flippantly: The Luddites hated technology because they feared it would take their jobs. While this project calls a lot of strong technological conventions into question, it doesn’t reject technology nearly as fundamentally as the Luddites did. It also has nothing to do with the feared obsolescence of labor.
When I read the headline screenless office, I thought about getting rid of monitors and desk chairs and replace them with high-resolution virtual reality headsets. I really want to be in the future when I don't need to sit all day at a desk staring at a screen.
That's be pretty cool. Or a step further with augmented reality; No need to print anything when you can just instantiate a persistent virtual "printout" and file them in virtual zero-g above your head, or anywhere in your own "slice" of the physical office
Now imagine doing this for years: every morning you walk into a windowless, empty room. Put VR on, work our 9-5. Get VR off, back in the windowless, empty room.
On the site, under '3. Slow Computing':
"Another aspect of contemporary screen-based culture is the constant psychic conflict often referred to as the "Attention Economy". In just trying to watch one youtube video, a typical user is confronted with dozens of other appeals to focus somewhere else: comments, ratings, related videos, advertisements, video responses, etc. Because screen-based interaction is premised on temporal immediacy, we are, as users forced into a state of hyper-attention where we must constantly fight against the, largely commercial, attempts to make us look at something else. When we remove the screen (and by necessity, simplify the interface) we introduce a new form of temporality, where the speed of interaction might more accurately reflect our ability to percieve and understand information."
I think this is the important part of the whole idea. On the other hand, and, in my opinion, you can achieve a similar experience as:
1. use a laptop and/or desktop
2. disable your notification system on your desktop
3. browse the web with an extremely simple browser, like w3m
4. one display
5. full-screen mode
6. don't scroll gradually; read from top to bottom and use pgup/pgdown
I found this the best way to focus on content and work, however, most workplaces won't tolerate not responding to instant messages and notifications.
The rise of Slack and friends is a definite detriment to actually hunkering down and getting work done.
Removing the "Slack and" from that sentence is a very bleak and dystopian message.
"Slack and friends" was meant to mean "Slack, Hipchat, Lync, and other similar office instant messaging applications," if you somehow thought I was blaming the recent development of human friendship for our woes.
Oh, right, I understood that! I just thought it was more humorous than anything
And yet there's a subculture that promotes just that, work hard and get rich. It's what's slowly destroying Japan for example.
Before Slack, the same stuff happened in IM. Slack hasn't added any significant noise in my day-to-day (with the exception of my phone, where I never installed IM clients but have chosen to install Slack).
Have we totally lost the ability to imagine a workplace without an instant messaging system everyone has to participate in?
Yes, in the same way that we have lost the ability to imagine a workplace without email or phones. Once you give people an efficient means of communication, it doesn't really go away. Skype for Business and its predecessors have been around for 10 years. I know Yahoo used IM internally for much longer than that and I'm sure many other companies did as well.
I actually don't think that IM is a net positive for me. The channel support in Slack/Teams/Stride is.
> I actually don't think that IM is a net positive for me. The channel support in Slack/Teams/Stride is.
Yep. No problems with dedicated phone number, dedicated im address, dedicated email, etc. Group chats, group discussions, mailing lists, git commit messages, wiki edits, etc - those are the ones that can be very hard to follow, especially if you're involved in many.
At my workplace I have no phone and no IM. I can be contacted in person or by email (which I check about 3x/day). Works pretty well.
IM has to be proactively set up by the organization so it would indeed "go away" if you just didn't have it. And it's less than clear to me that the ease of interrupting someone to send them a message should have such a high priority.
Everything has to be proactively set up. Phones and email don't set themselves up either.
If employees want it and the company doesn't provide it, they'll do it themselves, which is part of Slack's core business model.
They are also different in the sense that they are also useful for outside communication in a way IM isn't really.
Sure, but most employees who have a phone and email never use them to communicate outside the company (at least not in any business capacity).
Yes, it's the one where you spend more time in meetings, having people come up to your desk, phonecalls, etc.
People focusing full-time on the task at hand is an illusion and always has been; if it was real, it'd be bleak, depressing and more like forced labor / code monkeying than an ideal. There's a few people that can do it and actually enjoy it, but I'm fairly sure the vast majority would go mad.
I have worked with and without IM and have not found IM makes those things less frequent.
> most workplaces won't tolerate not responding to instant messages and notifications.
This. IM conversations take longer than in person ones (or video chats), have a higher rate of misunderstandings, cannot be flagged for follow up or bookmarked for reference, and the red blobs contribute to higher stress levels. It adds nothing to productivity, IMO. Yet being ‘present’ on slack is the new being at your desk before the boss.
My experience has been different. Things like slack have actually increased my ability to focus and get things done. My SLA for responding to slack is 2 hours, I can't focus on any one task for longer than that. Every two hours of so I check messages and respond then. It's great, it's far more relevant and filtered than email is and it isn't people showing up at my desk every 5 minutes.
> it's far more relevant and filtered than email
Huh? More filtered than email? Where in most cases you used to have sieve level server side filters and any kind of filter on the client side (in the real, desktop email clients era)? The capabilities of email filtering have been diminishing for many years, so I may even believe this is becoming true these days, but it certainly is shocking.
Not the person to whom you're responding, but my work email includes many messages from people who don't work for my company, while my Slack client doesn't. Not all of the Slack messages are relevant, but they are all more relevant than messages from outsiders.
Sort all email not from your company in a different folder or inbox, problem solved thanks to the filtering ability the GP talks about?
email includes all sorts of low priority or informational only messages that don't need to be addressed quickly. Chat is things that are high priority but not urgent. They can be safely ignored for a few hours. Urgent is a phone call or sneaker net. When I get people that think chat is for urgent I educate them but most people in the city I live already understand that urgent requires a voice or face to face to reduce any ambiguity. This is nothing like filtering email. You'd never use email if you expect a reply quickly unless it were paired with a visit.
> My SLA for responding to slack is 2 hours
You have a slack SLA?! How is that even measured, does slack have some kind of reporting tool?
> cannot be flagged for follow up or bookmarked for reference
I think one of the best parts of Slack is that the messages can be referenced by simple URL. For example from a ticket.
And searching helps find many old nuggets of information that were in a casual chat.
CPPGrey did it for a while with an iPad Pro setup with no apps except work and with no internet in a lone office. I rhink that could work for some types of tasks.
It is possible to do this with cwm (calm window manager) from OpenBSD; there is a linux port.
It's awesome, the first times in a long time that I have the feeling of "job done" when I shut down the computer.
I was previously using a tilling window manager (xmonad), but you can always collect garbage on another workplace.
With cwm, the possibility to really hide a window or to group them is unbelievable.
I find it hard to focus on just one thing, or do just one thing (like write without also listening to music, or having a long phonecall without fiddling or driving); not sure if that's something I should work on or accept as being part of my personality by now. It doesn't seem to have any major problems.
I'm quite the opposite, I struggle to truly multitask, but some of my co-workers seem to focus better when they have a YouTube video off to one side. Each person is different, and it doesn't matter all that much as long as the work gets done.
Disabling slack notifications other than direct messages is such a game changer. The constant notifications due to slack on some of my coworker's screens seem so distracting I don't know how they get anything done. I also have mostly all notifications on my iphone turned off.
While upgrading my Slackware current installation on an old recycled laptop, I decided to install Alien Bob's KDE5 package set for lutz (works well on a humble core-duo with 2Gb RAM). The readme advises installing outside of X, so I was sitting at a console for 45 mins while the packages downloaded and installed. Bored, I found myself hitting Ctrl-Alt-2 and Ctrl-Alt-3 to run w3m and mpg123 in different virtual ttys. Reading and Music. Around 60% of my normal laptop use cases covered there and then.
Posting this on Debian command line with the evilwm and Firefox. No notifications, quiet, minimal.
> don't scroll gradually; read from top to bottom and use pgup/pgdown
Am I just spoiled by smooth scrolling on all my devices, or is this hard to do for anyone else? For whatever reason, any "jerky" scrolling (e.g. using the arrow keys, page up/page down, "two finger scrolling" on laptops with bad drivers) just messes with my reading. I think the issue is that I don't like the feeling of text disappearing and reappearing somewhere else–I want my actions to control where the text is going fully so I don't have to re-track it with my eyes.
I thought the same until i was stuck working on the CLI for some time.
Give yourself an afternoon, i quickly adapted and now peruse the web mouseless fulltime; once your eyes know where to jump it becomes a lot easier to read and to focus, your eyes don't have to readjust as often and reading web pages becomes more book-like.
More than Pgup/Pgdown i find Spacebar and Home to be my most common choices for scrolling.
Not to take away from what is being done in this project, but I had to read the HN comments to figure out that this was a set of software for printers.
The project could really use some better copy on the landing page.
The landing page is as well-written and informative as 80% of the product announcement posted here, and I agree with you.
80% of the product announcements posted here are greeted with “the landing page needs better copy, I couldn’t figure out what it’s supposed to do.”
So, while I agree with you, it really doesn’t undermine OP at all. Especially as it’s common to see people get value from that response; we see creators quite often personally respond with “oh, crap, I didn’t realize, let me work on that.”
What is OP (the article?), and what is undermine?
I've always taken "OP" to mean "Original Poster" or "Original Parent" -- similar "GP" is often used to mean "Grandparent Poster", as in the post whose reply we are replying to. :)
idk if this was updated but i figured this out from the landing page in ~10secs. It's in sentence 3-4 on the page. If you're not reading the copy but instead comments only why complain about the landing page
I've read the copy on the site, the comments here, then went through to the code repository, and still don't really know what this project is or what its meant to do.
You mean this?
> It is constructed using free/libre/open hard- and software components, especially for print, databases, web-scraping and tangible interaction.
> Currently, it exists as a working prototype with software "bureaus" which allow a user to read and navigate news, web sites and social media entirely with the use of various printers for output and a barcode scanner for input.
That's really not clear. Also, your "if you're not reading the copy but instead comments" thing was both snarky and incorrect. Both are fine, but it's not recommended to be both disagreeable and wrong at the same time.
What part of "read and navigate news" and "printers for output and barcode scanners for input" isn't absolutely crystal clear? It fully and clearly explains what the system can do and how you interact with it. Do you not know what printers are? Barcode scanners? News?
Yeah, come on guys, this is obviously a renaissance of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat
Because it explains the mechanics but not the intent. Once you intuit the intent by reading more, you can go back and read the mechanics and get it. But in general, it's hard for readers who have no context to pull intent from mechanics. It also helps to acknowledge up front what's different, rather than first presenting the abstraction for that difference ("bureaus"). Something like: The intent of our project is to remove screens from modern computers. We explore presenting information only through physical printouts, and input only through barcode scanners.
Something like this?
"Another aspect of contemporary screen-based culture is the constant psychic conflict often referred to as the 'Attention Economy'. In just trying to watch one YouTube video, a typical user is confronted with dozens of other appeals to focus somewhere else: comments, ratings, related videos, advertisements, video responses, etc. Because screen-based interaction is premised on temporal immediacy, we are, as users forced into a state of hyper-attention where we must constantly fight against the, largely commercial, attempts to make us look at something else. When we remove the screen (and by necessity, simplify the interface) we introduce a new form of temporality, where the speed of interaction might more accurately reflect our ability to perceive and understand information."
http://screenl.es/slow.html
This kind of writing is not generally accessible so it's unclear and takes more effort to parse than more simplified language.
For example:
Because screen-based interaction is premised on temporal immediacy, we are, as users forced into a state of hyper-attention where we must constantly fight against the, largely commercial, attempts to make us look at something else
While I personally like the way this sentence is written, and is similar to my natural writing style, it's not easy to parse.
It could have as easily been written as:
"For most people, the time they spend on the computer is littered with distractions, and intentionally so, as corporations want to capture your attention by suggesting another video, viewing more content or offering a shiny ad."
You keep the emotion and information (lossy), but make it easier to read.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> ... Don't be snarky...
It's quite obvious that the landing page _isn't_ clear to a lot of people (including me). If you understood it with perfect clarity, good for you! Why not help explain it for others instead of being snarky?
I had no clue what they were talking about on the front page.
I am interested in everyone’s initial (and resulting) imagined depictions of what this is/looks like. I’m not sure how you can share this with me. Maybe they don’t even vary much.
My own depiction figures a slew of packing-taped barcodes on the tables and walls serve as references (links, shortcuts, scripts). So, the worst part is probably that organization abstractions are only accessible through the printer... a very slow command line... could be worse. But, I haven’t a clue how any of this stuff is developed without screens.
I keep trying to imagine what they're describing and every single possibility seems AWFUL and INFLEXIBLE.
The landing page isn't helping their cause. The "slow food" concept works great for food, but sorry, it just doesn't translate to "slow computing."
Looking a bit closer, this seems to be a design challenge/experiment. Not intended to be practical, but more like a provocative exercise in new possibilities. I actually like it. It is good to try-on half baked ideas sometimes.
> it just doesn't translate to "slow computing."
I think it does. If you can remember the Macintosh before the days of the MultiFinder, you ran one application at a time. The interface was simple, and you had to focus on the task at hand. Distractions were limited to any Desk Accessories you might have.
Ok, you did have a screen, but I think it is a good analogue to the Slow Food concept and has its own advantages over the interfaces we use today.
Because "software for printers" is actually not what this is.
It is an art project, an "artistic operating system", originally an assignment for design students, possibly a cruel joke, a "statement".
It's a peculiar failure of comprehension to look at all of that, wonder what it is, then find the software part and come back to the software developer website to report that it is "a set of software for printers".
Like a textile specialist staring at a painting for days, not getting it, then finally looking at the back side and, relieved, going back to report to the Textile News readership that it's a linen canvas, stretched and decorated on one side.
...and then suggesting they really should mount it on the wall the other way so people can more easily see what it is.
"Artistic operating system?" It says that they created software to interface with networked computers without a screen. Why is that "artistic" and not receptive to the same criticisms that normal technology is.
I for one think it's extremely unfortunate that no one bothered to tell them what a Telex was.... Could have saved the team a lot of trouble.
You're spectacularly (and snarkily) missing the point.
It's artistic because it's designed to make you think about different ways of interacting with technology. It is a choice to build a system under imposed constraints, which the Telex obviously was not.
I'm seeing tons of comments about this thing being wasteful or impractical, as if these weren't specifically discussed in the source material. They were. They know. Here's their statement from the "Why" page:
> ...poetic qualities instead of marketability.
Implying, of course, that comparable levels of usefulness are already established.
I will reserve my judgment until I see an actual practical demonstration that establishes that usefulness.
I'm not sure I know what you mean by "usefulness". I know that sounds weird, but they say they're not aiming to meet "standard principles of progress, universality and efficiency". So it sounds to me like the emotional/psychological impact on the user may be a higher priority for them than "good old fashioned productivity".
The statement assumes that one considers the poetic qualities as significant as marketability - not useful. You seem to have misunderstood the creators' intentions as they have no interest in providing you a "practical demonstration" or anything practical at all.
Art has little direct use - Michelangelo's David has very little practical value, yet it's significance is immense.
The creators of this project do not care for the practical value of any of this. They wish to experiment in the hope that some poetic qualities of their work will be deemed significant enough to carry on into new works (some of which may actually be useful).
> as they have no interest in providing you a "practical demonstration" or anything practical at all.
That was my exact understanding.
> until I see an actual practical demonstration that establishes that usefulness
Utility is an unusual metric by which to measure art
We can't comment on art? Can't lament its waste and implied value of the environment? Can't make suggestions on how a greater impact could be made (even if only to the commenter) with a few small tweaks, while still keeping the core values in place?
Sorry if it seems a bit snarky, but art is open to criticisms and critiques.
You can do of the above. Indeed, you personally did some of the above! Thanks! But many just came in and posted about it being wasteful and impractical, apparently unaware that the source material had already readily admitted as much about itself. To me, those comments don't add much to the conversation.
On Diversity:
> Our perception of the world around us and how we see ourselves in, it is mediated by the decisions of a few privileged managers, programmers and designers[...]. To suggest any other way of living in a networked society is to risk being percieved as blasphemous, uncool, out-of-touch, escapist or simply absurd. These interfaces have become so embedded in our conception of reality that we now have a crisis of the imagination, where it is difficult to even think of anything different.
I think that we are indeed losing computing diversity. Even something as boring as an Emacs-based computing experience (i.e. doing everything in Emacs) is often considered other-wordly or out-of-touch. Not having (and not wanting) a "smartphone" is another thing that is often responded to as almost unthinkable.
One small piece of this has reignited my desire to build something similar to the BERG Tiny Printer [1]. My only issue with such a thing is that I don't want to use thermal paper.. or any paper if I can avoid it.
Going forward, I think there may be a market for a small eink tablet (~4.5" or so) that presents curated news, articles, etc -- something ideal for commuting by bus, plane, or any other passive time without loads of animated ads, popups for newsletters, and absolutely nothing 'social.' This leads me toward a desire for proper epub releases for magazines like The New Yorker and stuff that could scale to a smaller screen.
Services like Zinio [2], which most libraries provide, would be an excellent tie-in for a small device like this.
[1] https://vimeo.com/32796535 [2] http://zinio.com
You could probably hack something very simple together with a kindle + email. Construct an ebook of top stories / headlines and email it to your kindle account, all the syncing/etc is then handled for you.
Calibre does it.
http://blog.calibre-ebook.com/2011/10/custom-news-fetching.h...
It does, but having used it, it's a real nuisance to clean up on a Kindle reader. You have to go through Amazon's web page to clean up the used articles, and its a bit of a pain.
A very cool feature, but ultimately not very practical.
yeah, a kindle would be perfect -- but the smaller form factor is key for me. I want something i can slip into a pocket.
The automation side wouldn't be too difficult either.
It looks like the Himnull project is fairly close, but most likely on the thicker side since it's using a pi.
[1] https://hackaday.io/project/16194-himnull-a-raspberry-pi-e-r...
Isn't an ereader basically such a device? Or where is the difference?
Combine it with Pocket or some epub newsletter.
Especially since e-ink works in direct sunlight and progress on sunlight readable screens seems to have ground to a halt at the Pixel QI.
I would pay for a decent sized e-ink screen with a stripped down browser that could integrate with a desktop bookmark app and save content for later reading. Not this "experimental" browser in my Kindle.
I really hope e-ink laptops become a thing. I want a text-focused computer with crazy good battery life and a full keyboard.
The only issue I see is typing fast could get frustrating given what I experience just typing on my kindle. Though maybe the applications and user habits would adapt around it to limit keystrokes and be more efficient.
Or they'd just attach a small digital output screen akin to those old typing machines that you'd then push to the main screen when done. Still wouldn't use much of the battery at least, but would look ugly.
I can see it being occasionally difficult but I touch type anyway and keep a mental model of what I'm writing. The tradeoff would be worth it for me.
Add an old-school word processor lcd screen for the current line you’re editing?
Yeah, that's what I mean. Essentially that's like a buffer you push to the main screen when done. Learning how to use ed could become relevant.
the main issue is the refresh rate. A while ago there was a kickstarter for the Hemingwrite [1] which looked to be heading down the right path.
It's surprising to me that the Yota phone [2] design didn't catch on. Having both a normal screen and an eink screen would be a killer feature, since most of what I do with my phone is text based and doesn't require any color.
[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/astrohaus/hemingwrite-a...
[2] https://yotaphone.com/gb-en/
EInk would share some of the advantages of this paper based approach, i.e. no distracting animations and great readability in Sunlight.
E-ink would actually be a pretty neat practical version of this kind of stuff. You get the relatively static display geared towards focus, without all the waste of printing out paper. I've felt like it's a really under-utilized technology. I know it's used in some displays for advertisements and information, but more research into it could bear a lot of fruit in low-energy-consuming electronics that don't use constant input. I'd love to see more software geared towards its use (and to be honest this thread is kind of inspiring me to go off and develop something) and more personal devices that use it. Especially when we're talking about environmentally conscious design, I don't think you're gonna get a more low-energy display than that. Hell, even the paper printing probably uses more energy.
This is, of course, a response to the "paperless" movement. The trouble is that the movement away from paper and toward digital can be about more than the capitalist drive for efficiency.
One of the words the author used was "universality". For me, that has a moral component as well. Consider that information stored in a digital textual encoding is universally accessible. For example, blind people can read it through text-to-speech or a refreshable Braille display. Text-to-speech is also useful for people who have trouble reading due to cognitive disabilities.
So, print things out for your own consumption if you like, but please don't require others to consume information in that form. And, insofar as "the _________ office" refers to a group environment, I think the best word to fill in that blank is "universal" or "inclusive".
BTW, when I heard "screenless", I imagined an office full of people using speech synthesizers as blind people do. In the blind community, "screenless" refers to a talking device with no screen (very often a device made specifically for blind people that lags behind the mainstream, but that's another story).
While I agree with your sentiment, I would argue that translating digital information for physical consumption (paper, e-ink, etc.) does lead to improved access for people with disability.
Digital textual encoding is only universally accessible if the context it is situated within is also textually encoded. The lack of context (i.e., poor accessibility compliance) across digital mediums is the single largest inhibitor for the visually impaired community. Once digital information is prepared for print, the source of output is simply a matter of changing peripherals (printer, braille embosser, braille display, text-to-speech).
The authors may not have intended to directly address the needs of disability, but I do not think that their use of "universality" is misplaced. We should applaud any effort that encourages society to think beyond the constraints of the graphical interface.
I’ve been meaning to put together a music player for my kids that uses one of: qr codes, bar codes, or NFC tags to select the music to play (no screen). The first two having surprisingly expensive readers (you can buy a crappy smartphone for the price of a dedicated usb always-on auto barcode or qr code scanner, and cheap webcams can’t focus correctly for the job of close-up code reading) and the latter confusing the hell out of me for any option that doesn’t use really expensive hobbyist-targeted tags ($0.50/tag or higher) have kept me from going beyond the googling phase.
One of the things I really miss with electronic book/music collection is the cover art: many of them are scary, unique, atmospheric, beautiful, and very much a living part of the album itself.
E-ink devices are brilliant things, but had I encountered Dragonlance without Elmore's paintings - or only in black & white - they may not have made the impression they did.
So a collection with large, good quality cover art, combined with qr codes that enables/plays/downloads the relevant book/album to your device is a pretty neat idea.
Maybe an old CueCat could work as a cheap barcode scanner?
https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=cuecat&_udhi=15
I had a similar idea. Since we have a lot of old Disney films on VHS, I would like to be able to put the box in a place and have the system and play back the HD version from my media center. I investigated RFID/NFC tags, but what would also be cool would be a kind of ultra flat scanner.
I imagine something purely optical, with no moving parts. You have a glass plate, maybe a few cm high, that you put the object to be scanned on, and the light is reflected into the plate on to a small CCD sensor hidden on the side or somewhere else. It doesn't have to have a great resolution, just enough to distinguish different movies. I tried googling, but it seems something like that doesn't exist (probably the achievable resolution is too bad for real world usage).
Its a bit unfortunate, I'd like to bring back a bit of physicality to my computer interactions.
Perhaps you could read the barcode on the box?
I'm trying to avoid a barcode reader "gun", or hanging a barcode reader from a cantilever. Ideally, I just want a flat platform, or something that can hold the box.
I'm pretty sure it should be possible to make a waveguide from properly shaped plexiglas and mirrors, so that you can hide a sensor below or in the side, and have it focused on the plexiglas surface. However, I can't figure out the geometry.
I guess if I actually built the project, the RFID tags would be the best option.
That makes sense. I agree that RFID is probably the way to go. What I was thinking of was closer to what you are describing though, or to a supermarket style in-counter barcode reader. I don't know if there's a minimum barcode-to-reader distance, but I suspect you could hack something up by building a box around one of these types* of readers.
Another downside to the barcode approach is also that it requires correct alignment. Maybe you can get greater convenience from RFID.
On the other hand, the RFID approach means you don't have to modify the boxes at all. Because the code should hold some semantic meaning, you could maybe even set it up to download the requested movie on demand, so that you don't have to build your own database...
Regardless, it's a fun idea!
* https://www.amazon.com/Barcode-Omnidirectional-Hands-Free-Su...
You can find a pack of ten blank NFC "stickers" on Ebay for less than $2, eg.: https://www.ebay.com/itm/10pcs-Ntag213-14443A-NFC-Tags-Stick...
They use a standard protocol[1], so I think any reader/writer that implements it should work.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_14443
I've had the idea since the early 00's to build "Dial M for MP3." This would have a rotary dial interface to a jukebox-style playlist on a printed card.
Have a look at https://yotoplay.com , it sounds similar.
What's wrong with cheap handheld barcode scanners, like this for $17:
https://www.amazon.com/Barcode-Scanner-Symcode-Handheld-Read...
It just acts as a USB keyboard (no drivers needed), so you could easily hook it up to a Rasperry Pi to do what you want.
Have you tried an Amazon Echo or similar microphone?
If you don't mind tinkering, a raspberry pi plus either a camera or a RFID reader would probably do the trick, for under $100 total.
https://www.sparkfun.com/products/14028 <= Camera
https://www.sparkfun.com/products/9963 <= RFID reader
https://www.sparkfun.com/products/14147 <= Example of RFID tags
"The Screenless Office is a system for working with media and networks without using a pixel-based display."
Oh boy... I miss the sound of teletypes, typewriters and, of course, vector based displays ;-)
No, seriously, I miss all those things... I'd kill (no, not really, but close) for a CDC 6600 console, a Tektronix calligraphic display terminal or an IBM 2250.
Are any of those available on ebay?
Alternatively, can those things be remade using modern tooling and/or the availability of cheap electronics from china?
> Are any of those available on ebay?
Sometimes a TTY appears. IBM Selectrics are easy to find. CDC and Tektronix stuff is much harder/borderline impossible. Building a vector CRT like the CDC and the 2250 is a major engineering undertaking these days and I don't even want to start what would it take to build a storage tube like Tek had.
I think a x,y display can be built off a CRT that miraculously escaped recycling and, by modulating RGB cannons, you may even get color vectors for free.
I'd love to do such a project, but the analog parts are way above my head. Haven't touched that since college.
I've found workflows with my reMarkable tablet that allow me to spend less time in front of a screen. I find getting away from my workstation to go think is immensely valuable. With my org-based publishing system I can put code, diagrams, and documents that render to PDF and sync to the device which allows me to "go offline" for a bit and edit, reflect, and remix those thoughts.
It's not quite as extreme as Screenless but I'm totally down with the message.
I'd like for my reMarkable to eventually be more capable of uploading my gestures to my server where I'm running recognition software that can talk to my compilers, theorem provers, etc and send me back more information.
I'd like to work in a space where the devices and artifacts surrounding me are more intuitive and conducive to the way I think rather than blending myself in with the way someone else designed the experience of thinking for me.
Sorry... what?! This seems absolutely absurd. Not to mention an incredible waste of paper.
Not absurd: artistic!
The latter does not preclude the former. :)
That said, the wastefullness of it doesn't appeal to me, though some of the ideas behind it do. I would think an adaptation of a e-ink display would be much more practical and much less wasteful, while conveying similar meaning.
It’s art. Commentary on our current state of affairs.
I second that. It’s absolutely impractical.
It’s hilarious that I’m getting down-voted on Hacker News for this. Does anybody actually disagree with me?
I don't disagree with you, it is impractical. But the whole point of the project is to challenge the exact tech conventions that lead one to conclude that it's impractical. So while I agree with you, saying "it's impractical" seems to miss the point.
I appreciate a whole host of conceptual, provocative, performance, and abstract art. I even enjoyed the frisson of the idea of the famous goldfish-in-the-blender. But I have difficulty assigning an actual cognitive validity to this project. It’s probably just me.
Judging by the readily quantifiable responses on HN expressing disapproval, I definitely don't believe it's "just you". As far as "cognitive validity" is concerned, the closest you'll get to an answer from the author is their "Why Screenless" section. But you may still be left in "agree to disagree" territory with them.
AFAICT it's a mix of vapourware and pseudo-'edgy' ranting.
Yep! Let's get rid a forest on this idea alone.
Found a youtube video of it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3LwrUpFVPI
This is really beautiful. I love the idea of designing interfaces that pinch off the flow of information just a bit so our attention can’t be forced to jump around as fast.
A photo would really be worth 1,000 words on that landing page.
I work as a software developer, I don't think I can really get away from having a screen as the central fixture on my desk. That said, for those whose work is not so centrally fixed around computing, elevating a monitor to the most central location on their desk strikes me as far less helpful.
My partner works works with college students, they are a counselor and adviser; meeting with students is the primary focus of their work. I was surprised to see, however, that the computer and display was still a big part of their desk. They have one of those L-shaped workstations with the front portion cleared so they can talk to students and the wall-side dominated by the computer's display.
Does the screen need to dominate their workspace? What sort of constant attention drain does the display represent on them and the students? I also believe it leads to unreasonable work performance related expectations, namely that they are entirely up-to-date on the most recent received email messages and memos, etc. Most of their time is spent working with students, the computerized portion of their work is mostly in the morning, brief snippets in between appointments and the end of the day.
This "screenless" idea seems somewhat extreme, but perhaps having the computing device in a clearly diminutive form-factor would go a long way towards changing their relationship with the machine, as well as expectations for how much time they spend reading email, memos, etc. I definitely think it's worth exploring.
In my opinion, the "open" office plans seem the most extreme version of this idea that the computing device should be central to one's workspace (and by extension, one's work). In some of these plans, there's almost no personal space at all, certainly no room for decoration or personal touches. On the contrary, the entire space is defined by the computer.
http://vanessaauditore.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/privac...
I am surrounded by books I hardly ever read, because I can get instant access to information without moving, thanks to my screen. But there are problems: 1) my screen also gives me instant access to an amazing vastness of distractions, and 2) the quality of information in the books around me is often much higher than the quality of information I can get instantly. But because of 1), I don't appreciate 2).
I think it would be interesting to experience a screenless office. Obviously I would think more deeply about things. Some of that thought would be "wasted," in the sense that I would be working things out I could simply look up on Stack Overflow. But I think there is a cognitive difference between working something out yourself and copying someone else's answer. In the former case, it feels like you are sort of exercising your own capacity to think, and in the latter case you can remain somewhat disengaged. The former is like walking a path, the latter is like watching a video of someone else walking it.
While paper is a renewable resource, this project is more of a thought experiment. Are we happy with the way we have become dependent on screens for computing? Every technology brings some tradeoffs—are we happy with the tradeoffs we are implicitly accepting? If not, what are we willing accept in return for change?
I don't think this is for me but I love this crazy idea and I love that someone is pushing the boundaries of my assumptions.
What about all the papers and ink that this project is using ?
This. I can kinda get behind what they're trying to do, but damn that uses a lot of paper...
Very interesting to see how this turns out for artists.
From one side, there are studies that show that brief interruptions boost the brain searching for creative solutions.
From another side, nothing gets done because FB, Reddit, cats and the likes tend to pull one in longer than expected. If somebody interupts you they go away after the issue, social media is there with another item forever.
Maybe we are seeing something fundamentally new, coming slowly with this idea?
It's curious that they don't seem to use speech synthesis and voice recognition as another screen alternative at all.
> Currently, it exists as a working prototype with software "bureaus" which allow a user to read and navigate news, web sites and social media entirely with the use of various printers for output and a barcode scanner for input.
Seems like a lot of wasted paper
I love the idea of having more ways to interact with computers/the internet. Pixels have been great, but I’d suggest technology based on them won’t ever fully hit a true “new phase” until much more can be done without pixels.
Am I wrong or is there nothing on that website that shows this thing actually working?
Nice project and great food for thought.
Why waste paper when you can use e-paper and achieve the same result, minus treeageddon?
Only 2 words sprang to mind: one was "Hipsters" the other rhymes with "tucking".
I agree 100%. So glad someone's finally bucking the prevailing hipster trends these days.
Very dumb, perfect execution. 10/10 would art again.
Highly ecological. Hurray for the liberally-minded artists.
The waste of paper will be enormous with a office setup like that. Just use dedicated ereaders or something like that.
I printed up this website on my dot matrix printer to read for later.
I sense a Luddite uprising.
I sense a you didn’t read the post / don’t know what Luddites were.
Put less flippantly: The Luddites hated technology because they feared it would take their jobs. While this project calls a lot of strong technological conventions into question, it doesn’t reject technology nearly as fundamentally as the Luddites did. It also has nothing to do with the feared obsolescence of labor.
I do know who Luddites where and what the site is about. It was meant as tongue in cheek but I think it just wasn't that funny. Sorry about that.
This has to be a joke, it feels like a Portlandia skit.
It’s art. Read the entire thing, it’s pretty short. The participants page goes into a little detail of the origin of the project.
When I read the headline screenless office, I thought about getting rid of monitors and desk chairs and replace them with high-resolution virtual reality headsets. I really want to be in the future when I don't need to sit all day at a desk staring at a screen.
That's be pretty cool. Or a step further with augmented reality; No need to print anything when you can just instantiate a persistent virtual "printout" and file them in virtual zero-g above your head, or anywhere in your own "slice" of the physical office
What would be inside the VR headsets if not more screens?
you do realize that virtual reality headsets have screens
Now imagine doing this for years: every morning you walk into a windowless, empty room. Put VR on, work our 9-5. Get VR off, back in the windowless, empty room.
It would completely destroy me within days.