News Receipts

Kunal Botla and Will Fosnot

News Receipts

Kunal Botla & Will Fosnot

News Receipts fuses the physical medium of newspapers and magazines with the digital content of online news feeds alongside media shared with them to create a dynamic source of content. Designed for the elderly population, News Receipts strives to create social interaction through the increasingly varied content and content shared with them from the large set of media available. It provides a comfortable, more familiar interface through printed paper. No Isolation’s Digital Exclusion report finds, “over 79% of all digital exclusion was among those aged 65 and over.” Furthermore, according to Zorowitz at Optum, dementia and other cognitive impairments can cause the elderly to forget how to use devices. Our design based on a conventional outdoor newsstand box aims to prevent those issues with a widely recognizable form. 


According to the Pew Research Center, nearly 50% of people over 65 primarily receive news from printed newspapers and magazines. News Receipts increases the amount of content available to the aging population by connecting them to a live feed of media. News Receipts uses a thermal receipt printer controlled by an Arduino microcontroller to create physical content. When someone opens the door of News Receipts it prints a recent article in a similar way to The Short Story Dispenser. The media is pulled from the New York Times. News Receipts improves the quality of content consumed and sets the older population up for discussion and discourse over it.