The PaperButtons project served a dual purpose: partly it evolved as a natural extension of the Palette project, partly it addressed some issues of general design method, facing a pleasant but nevertheless challenging task of expanding the functionality of a very simple and user friendly application.

The overall domain of concern was "tangible interfaces": one of the central ideas was to shift the burden of interaction away from an overloaded intellectual task domain over to an underutilized domain of motor skills.

PaperButtons was an early technology exploration, gauging how the emergent technology of RFID tags could be embedded in paper, while also making the actual work practices of creating PaperButton'ed cards an integral part of the users daily work.

Reference paper(s):

Elin Rønby Pedersen, Tomas Sokoler, Les Nelson: PaperButtons: Expanding a Tangible User Interface. ISBN:1-58113-219-0. Pp. 216-223. This reference paper for the PaperButtons was presented at DIS 2000 in NYC. ACM Portal to Computing Literature, see http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=347723