Palim

The industry of paper production remains a top consumer of many natural resources, including fossil fuels, trees, water or toxic chemicals, and it is responsible for 25% of landfill waste in the US. Many of these resources go towards the production of printed text, a market which has been growing despite the emergence of digital formats. The demand for printed text is not going away as there is strong support for the benefits of reading printed text rather than digital. Palim will create a new way of consuming printed content by proposing a new printing mechanism that will pull in printed pages, erase the existing content via heat, and reprint new content.

The commercialization phase of this project was to design our idealized home use device. This printer is designed to blend seamlessly into a home bookshelf and houses the thermochromic ink supply and printing mechanisms, along with the heated erasing module. This commercialization phase will also include the launch of Palim’s re-printable book application where a user can manage their digital bookshelf and control what to send to their Palim printer.

This project was nominated to be published and archived by the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) and the Loeb Library as part of the record of the GSD.