PlayBook

Reflecting on our programmable ink work to date, we realized two things.

Firstly, we’d focused a lot on how to program with ink. Crosscut, Untangle, and Inkling all explored bidirectional evaluation and constraint solving, applying them to different use cases with different interfaces. Inkbase focused on the properties of objects and how they feed into dynamic behaviour. Inkbase, Habitat, and Inkling thought a lot about where computation lives on the canvas. We’d focused less on what we might actually use programmable ink to do. We hadn’t made our own dogfood.

Secondly, we approached it purely as research — asking questions. What are the key ingredients? What happens if we put these ideas together? How do you work in the small, or in the large? How do we want it to feel?

PlayBook takes a different approach. It started as a top-down design for a digital notebook with programmable ink. We started by selecting specific use cases to support, then designed a set of materials — ink, paper, pin, beam… — each with a set of physics that bridge the gap between expressive note taking and programming. After wrapping up work on the design, we spent several months on implementation, focusing on performance and robustness. We plan to continue building on top of this technical foundation in future projects.

Later in 2025, we will share our design process, artifacts, the prototype, and several experimental projects built atop it.