5. On paper (part 1)

This one is about paper, books, and interfaces - the first of a few on this topic.

Lucie Paterson and I recently finished our academic paper for Museums and the Web. It isn’t online yet which is a shame - they usually go live a few weeks before the conference - because its about making a paper map that came to life inside an exhibition. At least you can read Lucie’s which formed the seed of it. MW is an annual conference that takes place in North America - my first one was way back in 2005 and it wasn’t until my second in 2007 that it became an annual fixture in my work calendar for ten consecutive years. I met so many good people at MW that each year it became as much about catching up with friends, schemeing new projects, as it was about being exposed to new ideas. This year is my first one since I moved back to Australia. For the last three years I’ve been sending other team members instead - just as it was when my former bosses made it possible for me to go. One of the notable things about MW was that every year it would collate it’s ‘best’ submissions into a printed book that came included with conference registration. Most of us never looked at the book but it would sit beside our desks for other people to come past and leaf through. It had an presence.