Little Printer: designing the new domestic landscape
Contemporary design practice in the age of the network
Little Printer is a product of now. It is a product, a tangible thing, but is also a product, in the sense of a consequence, of contemporary culture. It humbly and accessibly exemplifies how physical and digital have merged to become one, to become hybrid objects, to demonstrate how objects might become networked, and how domestic objects might behave.
It also speaks of a contemporary design process, and that’s what we’ll focus on here. Little Printer itself, perhaps due to that innate ability to make clear the promise of digital/physical objects in such an everyday kind of way, has been covered in depth elsewhere, even for a product that only a handful of people have touched at time of writing. Yet the design process, and the culture, that it emerges from is less well-known. Actually this may be the more interesting story. Little Printer will come and go, no doubt, and as a harbinger of tomorrow’s products today, will be superseded by one, or several, of the adjacent possibles…
