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An examination of why paper continues to fill our offices and a proposal for better coordination of the paper and digital worlds.Over the past thirty years, many people have proclaimed the imminent arrival of the paperless office. Yet even the World Wide Web, which allows almost any computer to read and display another computer's documents, has increased the amount of printing done. The use of e-mail in an organization causes an average 40 percent increase in paper consumption. In The Myth of the Paperless Office, Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper use the study of paper as a way to understand the work that people do and the reasons they do it the way they do. Using the tools of ethnography and cognitive psychology, they look at paper use from the level of the individual up to that of organizational culture.Central to Sellen and Harper's investigation is the concept of "affordances"--the activities that an object allows, or affords. The physical properties of paper (its being thin, light, porous, opaque, and flexible) afford the human actions of grasping, carrying, folding, writing, and so on. The concept of affordance allows them to compare the affordances of paper with those of existing digital devices. They can then ask what kinds of devices or systems would make new kinds of activities possible or better support current activities. The authors argue that paper will continue to play an important role in office life. Rather than pursue the ideal of the paperless office, we should work toward a future in which paper and electronic document tools work in concert and organizational processes make optimal use of both.… (more)
Media reviews
'A single sheet is light and
It is porous, which means that is markable and that marks are fixed and spatially invariant with respect the the underlying medium.
It is a tangible, physical object.
Engagement with paper for the purpose of marking or reading is direct and local. In other words , the medium is immediately responsive to executed actions, and interaction depends on physical copresence.'
These affordances lead to certain consequences. For example, the fact that paper is tangible and has locality means that when a paper is on my desk at work, it acts as a reminder to do something about it. Or, the fact that paper can be easily bent, means that I can easily tell what pages I should go back to when writing the blog post about this book. The book has many more examples of these sorts of consequences. "
User reviews
The writers of this book are consultants on organizational culture and document management, and although the book is now dated, their anthropological approach to
An example was at the IMF, where analysts delivered documents to one another by hand, so as to have an excuse to informally introduce and discuss the information with the recipient. Or for air traffic controllers, the ability to quickly change the position of a strip of paper 90 degrees to indicate that a plane was doing something unusual, so that a glance around the room showed how much unusual activity was taking place.
As I was reading this book, I referred back to Chapter 4 of Jeff Johnson's "Designing with the Mind in Mind," in which he describes how we struggle with the unnatural task of reading, for which our human brains were not evolved. The physical aspects of paper and document construction that we've invented over centuries were developed to ease this task.
For example paper makes it easy to arrange documents side by side, and to move our eyes from one to another without tools or software getting in the way, to use the tactile skill of writing to take notes that reinforce memory, to use location memory to recall where something is fixed on a page so that we can follow the structure of a complicated idea, to flip back and forth between parts of a book using nothing but fingers to hold our place, to glance at a document on a desk and identify it and assess its key features.
The ephemeral nature of paper, its sharing limitations, and its fragility are limitations, but those characteristics also make it easy to control access tightly when needed, to tear, fold, shift, flip and dogtag, to arrange around a desk or workspace easily, and to mark it permanently and anonymously.
More importantly, work processes have been developed over decades that make the most of these features of paper, and that is why it remains stubbornly with us. The authors conclude that we need document management systems that can better mimic what paper can do. At the time of the writing of this book, those were rare, but with touchscreen tablets and wikis so common today, I believe that is finally changing. Interestingly their criticism of e-book readers still does hold true in my opinion--while preserving the bare experience of reading they still have removed many of the "affordances" of paper that make the reading process easier on the human brain.
Well written, accessible, and full of wonderful stories (and ideas of how to make offices truly paperless), I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in organisational culture and sopcial impact on technology.