BERG’s “Little Printer” Lets You Create Personalized Mini-Newspapers Of Web Content

London-based design studio BERG are fond of imagining the future, but their latest video, which tackles the future of publishing and the topic of digital vs. print information delivery, isn’t just another a case of design fiction.

The Little Printer acts as a kind of physical manifestation of the live streams we’re all familiar with from social media, translating them back into the ticker tape-like format they were originally derived from. It allows you to subscribe to various publications, feeds and status updates, which are then printed out into a “mini-newspaper” for you to enjoy at your leisure and can be customized to include everything from puzzles to text messages to news headlines, calendar reminders, status updates and a whole lot more. You can schedule timed deliveries to enjoy with your morning coffee or print them out on demand whenever you want to have a quick scan of what’s going on in the world but can’t bare to look at the screen any longer.

As with all BERG projects, the Little Printer features an impecable, clean, friendly design aesthetic. These little newspapers take their “visual cues from traditional halftone lithography and modern pixel art” and the mini-newspapers are produced using an inkless thermal printer inside the device, which hooks up wirelessly to the web. Subscriptions are managed via an app on your smartphone which allows you to curate your feeds from various publication sources—the Guardian, Google and Foursquare have already signed up to create custom publications. It’ll only be available in 2012, so it won’t make the Christmas list unfortunately, but no doubt you want one anyway.