It’s a fascinating design approach. Taking a few basic primitives (paper, ink) and seeing how much mileage you can get out of them without interfering with their fundamental behaviors, but also without adding new primitives. Most interaction design would add a new primitive for every high-level user need instead. Which to be fair probably makes more sense for practical product design needs. But the ability to compose/decompose sophisticated behavior from/into smaller parts I think is a hallmark of software that really works as a predictable tool with a high ceiling for what kinds of problems you can tackle. I guess well-designed programming languages are a perfect example of that.

Enjoyed the presentation, at least, but maybe I'm left feeling a little naive about the use of "paper" in the pitch. Not so much a metaphor as not actually a paper notebook

From Ink & Switch, discussion on HN from 6 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49842270

One of the coolest demos I've seen out of Ink N' Switch in while (tbh, it's seemed like they were really cooking for the year or so).

Unfortunately, it seems they live demo they published is missing a number of the demos they featured in the talk (and its unclear how to do your own things), so it's a little hard to evaluate this more deeply.

Cool demo - but like others have said I'm not convinced about the use of "paper"

cool, but they should stick to "handwriting" and drop the paper, because this is clearly not paper

I'm really interested in PlayBook and what Ink & Switch are doing. I wish more of their work was out in the open so it would be easier to try out.