Digital video (color, sound), 3:25 min.

Beyond the Fold imagines the newspaper of the future, as have many speculative projects of the past two decades. But Sebastian Bettencourt’s design abandons the now-familiar elements of digital interfaces, such as buttons and icons, to focus on the newspaper’s spatial properties, presence, and relationship to a reader’s motions, looking beyond the transfer of information to evoke the reading experience. Familiar motions steer the interaction: unfolding the device activates it, turning pages navigates through it, and shaking refreshes content. Cutting-edge technology is maximized while the timeless ritual of reading the newspaper is honored. The concept, presented as Bettencourt’s graduate thesis, was illustrated with a video edited by Joel Nathanael Smith.