Signature Flip and Clip: Virtually Flipping and Dog Earing Pages in a Digital Lab Book

Paper-based lab books have been used successfully by scientists for hundreds of years. The historic success of the lab book has much to do with the affordances of paper: ease of data entry, robustness of the media, rapid access to previous conent, ease of marking pages of interest. We describe Signature Flip and Clip, an interaction technique that provides the affordances of two of the attributes of a paper lab book: flipping through pages of experiments and dog earing information of current interest. We describe our approach, and its deployment within the Smarttea Lab Book system, and present the results of a design test of the system with chemists, and plans for generalizing the technique.