Reverse-Skeuomorphism of the Day: A Zoomable Paper Map

Designers spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to evoke the real world in the digital one (this is why the virtual trash on your computer screen looks like a real garbage bin, and why you can turn the pages on an ebook as if they were made out of paper). Inevitably, this relationship was bound to change directions. Behold: an actual paper map that behaves a lot like a virtual one.

User experience consultant Anne Stauche has created "the zoomable map on paper," a square map that brilliantly unfolds into views of the city at different scales. Stauche has already designed the hand-folded "map²" for London and Berlin, and she's working on one for New York City. But it's no easy feat to make and mass produce these things, and so Stauche has a Kickstarter campaign winding down to expand the series.