As someone who’s a huge fan of journaling, I’m always on the lookout for things that can help me in my journey, whether it’s analog or digital. For the past years, we’ve seen products and devices that are trying to be a little bit of both. And there are people who enjoy both kinds of journaling as well so you know that there’s a market for that. Just in case you don’t know anything about journaling, you can probably recognize it by its more old-school name: diary.
Designer: Seongmin Ha, Hanyoung Lee
This concept called Dear my diary is a great combination of analog and sort-of digital. Some people who journal like the idea of actually writing down their thoughts and feelings but the problem is storage. You’ll have to scan each page and save them on a cloud to be able to “save” a copy of your journal entries. But what if you could combine both? So the designers came up with something that lets you write in an analog manner but also lets you store it digitally.
The device looks like a classic computer but instead of a keyboard, you get a small, erasable slate where you can write your journal entries. These are then saved into a tiny disk, designed to look like the floppy disks of olden times but much smaller. It’s not indicated how much megabytes or gigabytes storage each of the disks have, what format these will be saved in, or if you’ll be able to access these files on other devices.
The Dear my diary also comes with a printer, in case you wanted to print out your journal entries and post them on your cork board or on your other analog, actual journal. The disk is inserted into the printer and you’ll be able to have a printed copy of what you wrote on the slate but on a specific format that the printer has. It looks like one of those thermal printers that you use for labeling and well, printing stuff.
I still don’t have an idea how this diary device will actually work in real life but I am very much intrigued. Given that I keep both a digital diary and an actual journal, I am definitely the target market for something like this.
