Printing Paper Technology for Development
Joy Ming, Ishita Ghosh, Jay Chen, Azza Abouzied · 2014
Despite the recent push toward leveraging information and communication technologies (ICTs) for replacing paper-based tasks, there remain many barriers to designing deployable and appropriate technical solutions that replace paper. As a result, paper tools such as forms, charts, and graphs continue to be widely used in low-resource organizations working in developing regions. However, designing effective paper-based tools that perform computation-like tasks such as addition, subtraction, lookup, and visualization can be difficult. In this demo, we present printr, a system that allows a publisher to rapidly generate and print these "smart" paper tools. WIth printr we demonstrate one way to improve paper tools and leverage benefits of both paper and ICTs with only a fraction of the development, deployment, training, and operational costs of software applications.