Hasta La Ideas

The Interwebosphere has been abuzz with news about the very device that may be spell—or rather, print—its unmaking: earlier this week, London-based design consultancy Berg unveiled their latest innovation, the Little Printer. The desktop device is roughly the size of a cube of Post-It notes, configured to produce a receipt-sized analogue for a newspaper featuring personalized content culled from the otherwise never-ending newsfeeds that all but define the Information Age.

Little Printer lives in your front room and scours the Web on your behalf, assembling the content you care about into designed deliveries a couple of times a day. You configure Little Printer from your phone, and there’s some great content to choose from—it’s what Little Printer delivers that makes it really special.

In other words, Berg has taken the burgeoning, buzzword-y, possibly made-up notion of ‘content curation’ to the next level with the Little Printer, which produces a personalized physical document—at once one-of-a-kind and patently disposable—on a twice-daily publishing schedule. The excellent video is set to hit a million views (with your help) within a week of going live:

Of course, the real—in every sense of the word—appeal of the Little Printer lies in the tactility of its output, which transmogrifies two-finger scrolling into a good old-fashioned scroll, of sorts, an escrow in the original sense. It’s not so much that we’ve been desensitized by touchscreens; rather, we’re accustomed to them, and the effect of seeing content that is commonly presented under glass (literally) writ small is charming, if not altogether refreshing. Hence, Berg’s characterization of the Little Printer as “more like a family member or a colleague than a tool.”

Before you ask, it’s scheduled to launch in 2012; more on the tech and an exclusive Q&A with Berg Principal Matt Webb after the jump…

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