BERG didn't yet have the resources to produce one, so Matt Webb and company built something else to indulge his scientific curiosity. In 2006 BERG debuted Availabot, a voodoo-like figurine meant to represent a friend's instant messenger status. The figurine popped up when a designated friend signed online and flopped down when they signed off. It was undeniably phallic and humorous in nature, but it worked. "It's tech that doesn't feel inhuman," Webb says, "giving things character that represents a real life behavior." Only a handful of Availabot units were ever produced.

As Little Printer sits nearly completed, tightly enclosed in his hands six years later, other ideas are already fluttering through his head. "Wouldn't it be awesome if when your phone was talking to the network you could tell by observing tiny movements in the surface of the phone?" Webb asked. He shows me the back of his iPhone and wiggles his fingers around as he looks at me. "Then you could see when background apps are doing something — it's making things more legible by making them physical," he says. "It leads you down a form of design that's more human." A BlackBerry LED light does not emote exuberantly enough for Webb. He knew that unlike Microprinter, his printer would need to create lasting value, and unlike an LED, would need to be very specific. "We need to get back to where paper is something you want to keep in your pocket or give to someone," he says.

He cites a piece of twitching string as one of the main inspirations for Little Printer's utility. Called "Live Wire," or simply "dangling string," it hung from the ceiling at Xerox PARC years ago, serving as a glanceable indicator for how congested the company's servers were at any given point. The string would twitch frantically when the network was busy, and less so during off-peak hours. PARC chief scientist at the time Mark Weiser called it calm technology. "That's all it did," Webb says. "Everyone had this ambient awareness of how busy things were. If the string is twitching and you're trying to download a file, perhaps you'll leave the room and try again in a few minutes." The string represents a distracted boss that can't respond right now. As you approach his or her desk, a waving hand or furrowed brow indicates that you might want to come back later. "It's giving us a new sense looking into the virtual world," Webb says.

Inspired by the dangling string, Webb wrote a piece of software called Glancing that sought to create a digital fifth sense for humans. Glancing was a menu bar app for Mac with an eye for a logo, and depending on the status of others near you, the eye might be open or closed. "It's a representation of how much people are looking around, but in a virtual way," Webb says. "In an office, if you look up and you see that everyone's looking around, you all get up and get coffee. All of that is built on something simple: glancing and eye contact." Webb's application evolved into a totem he frequently mentions, a symbol of his desire to reproduce human behaviors digitally. "In cyberspace there's no visibility," he complains. "Back in 2003 when I wrote this software, there was this idea that you were present or not present. Nobody really believes in offline anymore."

Looking even further back, Webb told me about a prototype mobile answering machine built in 1992 by Durrell Bishop, who is more recently a BERG collaborator. Instead of interacting with an answering machine using buttons, Bishop's answering machine used marbles that each represented a message. When a message was left for you, a marble would pop out of the machine. You could put the marble in your pocket for later, or you could drop the marble back into the machine to play your message. "Bishop made an invisible and complex interface completely legible by doing it with physical things," Webb says. "We need to stop thinking about the physical and digital as separate realms."