Sticking paper

Who'd have thought getting suitable paper would be such a trial. After researching potential paper options, we had settled on two choices, lining wall paper or newsprint paper. We knew that we were working to a budget but also the nature of the experiment meant that the paper did not need to be high quality, just durable enough to hold together while people walked on it. 

After shopping around we realised that wall paper lining, although easier to put together would cost considerably more than we first thought. Wilko's had 10m rolls for £2.00, the dimensions of the unit mean that we would have needed a minimum of 12m per person. With a projected minimum number of participants being 30, we would need 36 rolls costing £72.

The print technician Hannah suggested that we try the Chinese supermarket for newsprint, because it was very reasonably priced at £6.95 per pack. We settled for two packs, hoping we would have enough to cover the area of the installation for the minimum number of participants. The downside to the newsprint was that sticking together 28 pieces of paper (each sheet is 20in x 17in) for each individual participant was very labour intensive. It also means that we have to try and make as many extra sheets incase we have more participants than we anticipate.  Obviously the more participants the better and more varied data we will collect, so we need to make sure we are as productive as possible with the remaining time pre-experiment, to make plenty of extras. 

The plus side of the quantity of paper we ended up with, is that we can potentially print our publication on the remaining paper.