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Reviews and citations for

"The Myth of the Paperless Office"
Authors: Abigail J. Sellen and Richard H. Harper
Published by: MIT Press
Copyright 2001
ISBN: 0-262-19464-3

Alison Kidd "The Marks are on the Knowledge Worker"  - established a firm "The Prospectory"

This page is a sort of "review of reviews" - which might look like esearch eating itself - but of course that is precisely what research has to do.

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Review on Information Research by Prof Tom Wilson, March 2002. (InformationR.net)

"The question driving the work behind this book is one that anyone in the information world must have thought about:

... why, when we have all the latest technology to allow us to work in the digital world, do we depend on paper so heavily? Indeed, why are most workplaces so dependent on paper? It seems that the promised "paperless office" is as much a mythical ideal today as it was thirty years ago." (Quoting S&H)

Rather than aimlessly theorising about these questions, the authors of this excellent text actually tried to find answers - and succeeded. In doing so, they not only answer the questions but expose the methods they used in a way that will benefit other researchers seeking to discover how not only paper but information generally is used in organizations."

Prof Wilson divides the book into three components:

Problems are set out in the introduction and chapter 2  - "What's wrong with paper" sets out the background and offer two case studies of attempts to create a paperless office. The succesful case study set out to create change in the organization and succeeded in getting id of paper where it was appropriate to do so. The unsuccesful case put getting id of paper as a central goal and failed because the way people worked did not change.

Chapters 3,4 & 5 address key aspects of "affordances". Affordances are introduced earlier and are "... the properties of paper that determine the possibilities for actions involving paper". The areas explored are:

use of paper in knowledge work
reading from paper
paper in support of working together.

Use of Paper focuses on the International Monetary Fund in Washington DC. Work was sponsored by Xerox, where the authors were working at the time. They discovered that "... paper supports at least five important aspects of knowledge work :"

• It supports authoring work
• Knowledge workers review documents on paper, especially their colleagues work.
• When they plan ... they use pencil and paper ...
• Paper supports collaborative activities
• Paper helps ... grease the wheels of communication ... workers print and hand deliver.

They conclude " ... there were complex reasons for the persistence of paper, the most significant of which is that paper serves the IMF's knowledge workers well for the tasks they have to hand. These individuals use paper at certain stages in their work not because they are unwilling to change, but because the technology they are provided with as an alternative to paper does not offer all they need." (S&H)

"Chapter 4 'Reading From Paper' deals paper and screen and notes that paper has the following:

• Flexible navigation through documents
• Cross referencing more than one document at a time
• Easy annotation
• Interweving of reading and writing

A third section looks at paper in support of people working together in an Air Traffic Control centre, a police force and a chocolate manufacturing company. These roles were found for paper

• A flexible medium for displaying real-time information
• aids team coordination
• provides a 'holding station' until information is ready to be shared
• supports face to face interaction
• supports retrieving, organizing and documenting an individuals knowledge
• its a representation of knowledge that may need augmentation from other sources.

InformationR.net 

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Christian Science Monitor Article By Matt Bradley

This article takes a different approach, suggesting that the paper boom may be ending.

"What ever happened to the paperless office?" - "The dream seems to recede further into the future every year. But now sales show that offices may finally be turning the page on paper use."

Paper consumption may be slowing.

Reports that " .. after decades of hype, American offices may finally be losing their paper obsession.  The demand for paper used to outstrip the growth in the US economy, but the past two or three years have seen a marked slowdown in sales - despite a health economic scene."

In the early to mid '90s, a booming economy and improved desktop printers helped boost paper sales by 6 to 7 percent each year. Now the growth ate  is flattening by about half a percent each year.

Old Habits

Merilyn Dunn, communications supplies director for InfoTrends/CAP Ventures, a market research firm in Weymouth, Massachussets.

"Old habits are hard to break ... There are some functions that paper serves where a screen display doesn't work. Those functions are both its strength and its weakness." A primary reason is that some 47% of the workforce entered the job market after computers had already been introduced to offices.

John Maine, vice president of RISI, a pulp and paper economic consulting firm in Chralottesville, Virginia. "We're finally seeing a reduction in the amount of pepare being used per worker in the workplace ... More information is being transmitted electronically, and more and more people are comfortable with the information residing only in electronic form without printing multiple backups."

Paper Shell

Paul Saffo of Institute for the Future in Palo alto, California was author of a 1989 essay "The electronic piñata". He suggests that electronic data necessarily require more paper - but that    "The information industry today is like a huge electronic piñata, composed of a thin paper crust surrounding an electronic core ... the paper crust is most noticeable, but the hidden electronic core that produces the crust is far larger - and growing more rapidly. The result is that we are becomming paperless, but we hardly notice at all." 

Saffo also points out that electronic communication might cut air-travel - but doesn't.

"Thats one of the great ironies of the information age ... It's just common sense that the more you talk to someone by phone or computer, it inevitably leads to a face-to-face meeting. The best thing for the aviation industry was the Internet."

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The New Yorker - The Critics section. Article by Malcolm Gladwell

"The Social Life of Paper - Looking for method in the mess." Issue 2002-03-25

"Consumption of ... the most common kind of office paper  - ose almost fifteen percent in the United States between 1995 and 2000. This is generally taken as evidence of how hard it is to eradicate old, wasteful habits and how stubbornly resistant we are to the efficiencies of computerization. A number of cognitive psychologists and ergonomic experts, however, don't agree. Paper has persisted, they argue, for very good reasons: when it comes to performing certain kinds of cognitive tasks, paper has many advantages over computers. The dismay people feel at the sight of a messy desk ... arises from a fundamental confusion about the role that paper plays in our lives."

Sellen and Harper begin with an account of a study they conducted at the International Monetary Fund in Washington. Economists at the IMF spend most of their time writing reports ... work that would seem perfectly suited to sitting in front of a computer [but] the IMF is awash in paper.

"The business of writing reports ... is an intensely collaborative process, involving the professional judgements and contributions of many people. The economists bring drafts of reports to conference rooms, spread out the relevant pages, and negotiate changes with one another. They go back to their offices and jot down comments in the margin, taking advantage of the freedom offered by the informality of the handwritten note. Then they deliver the annotated draft to the author in person, taking him, page by page, through the suggested changes. At the end of the process the author spreads out all the pages with comments on his desk and starts to enter them on the computer - moving the pages around as he works, organizing and reorganizing, saving and discarding.

Without paper, this kind of collaborative, iterative work process would be more difficult. ... "

Affordances

Sellen and Harper suggest paper has unique "affordances", qualities that permit specific uses.

Paper is tangible: we can pick up a document, flip through it, read little bits here and there and quickly get a sense of it. (In another study on reading habits, Sellen and Harper observed that in the workplace, people almost never read a document sequentially, from beginning to end, the way they would read a novel.)

Paper is spatially flexible, meaning we can spread it out and arrange it in the way that suits us best .

And it is tailorable: we can easily annotate it, and scribble on it as we read, without altering the original text.

Quotes Sellen and Harper:

"Because paper is a physical embodiement of information, actions performed in relation to paper are, to a large extent, made visible to one's colleagues. Reviewers sitting around a desk could tell whether a colleague was turning toward or away from a report; whether she was flicking through it or setting it aside. Contrast this with watching someone across a desk looking at a document on a laptop. What are they looking at? Where in the document are they? Are they really reading their e-mail? Knowing these things is important because they help a group coordinate its discussions and each a shared understanding of what is being discussed." (S&H)

"Paper enables a certain kind of thinking" - represented by piles of information. "The piles look a mess but they aren't. When a group at Apple Computer studied piling behaviour several years ago, they found that even the most disorderly piles usually make perfect sense to the piler, and that office workers could hold forth in great detail about the precise history and meaning of their piles. The pile closest to the cleared, eighteen inch square working area, for example, generally represents the most urgent business, and within that pile the most important document of all is likely to be at the top. Piles are living, breathing archives. Over time, they get broken down and resorted, sometimes chronologically and sometimes thematically; clues about certain documents may be physically emedded in the file by, say, stacking a certain piece of paper at an angle or inserting dividers into the stack.

Psychologist Alison Kidd argues that "knowledge workers" use the physical space of the desktop to hold "ideas which they cannot yet categorize or even decide how they might use." The messy desk is not necessarily a sign of disorganization. It may be a sign of complexity: those who deal with many unresolved ideas simultaneously cannot sort and file the papers on their desks, because they haven't yet sorted and filed the ideas in their head." Many people "use the papers on their desks as contextual cues to "recover a complex set of threads without difficulty and delay".

Sellen and Harper quote Kidd's work and came to similar conclusions. They looked at the work of a chocolate makers purchasing department and found that although the company wanted an electronic document system the buyers kept paper files. The paper files had all sorts of idisynchratic brochures, advertising paraphenalia, notes,  and papers in them - many of them with notes only meaningful to the files owner and organised according to the whims of the individual buyer. People wanting to look at a document often had to be walked through it by it's owner because it simply wouldn't make sense otherwise. Digitizing some documents wouldn't make them available to anyone - because they wouldn't make sense.

"The corresondence, notes and other documents such discussions would produce formed a significant part of the documents buyers kept. These materials therefore supported rather than constituted the expertise of the buyer. In other words, the knowledge existed not so much in the documents as in the heads of the people who owned them - in their memories of what the documents were, in their knowledge of the history of that supplier elationship, and in the recollections that were prompted whenever they went through the files." (S&H)

"This idea that paper facilitates a highly specialized cognitive and social process is a far cry from the way we have historically thought about the stuff. "

//

Air traffic controllers in charge of 25 airplanes  to aid in this there is a large monchromatic radar console - but also scribbles notes on pieces of paper known as flight strips.

Lots of people determined to modernise US air traffic control

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Technology & Society web site -  Reviewer Kirk McElhearn - kirk@mcelhearn.com freelence writer and translator.

"... the past few years have shown that people do not want to read novels on electronic devices, nor do business people ... want to read reports exclusively on them. E-books will be fine for technical manuals, when the proponents of this technology wake up and realize it. Anyone building complex products that call for thousands of pages of documentation would be delighted to have their manuals on PDAs or similar devices; I would love to see dictionaries and encyclopedias on e-book readers as well."

".. the computer is the canvas on which documents are created, ... the top of the desk is the palette on which bits of paper are spread in preparation for the job of writing."

"Several of the chapters read like research reports, the kind often found in business books, where case studies are examined. A chapter on air-traffic controllers, and their use of paper, is by far the most obscure, since few of us use paper as they do."

McElhearn's criticism might be a bit unfair because the point about air traffic control is that even at a pinnacle of technology people still use paper because its right for the job?

Technology & Society web-site. 

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Economist Article Dec 19th 2002. "In praise of clutter - Leave my desk alone. It works."

The Economist article is avialable online (link below) but raises sufficient points to merit extensive quoting. The author starts by listing the contents of his own desk and those of some colleagues. Contrast this with the "clean desk" policies run by United Parcel Service and General Motors in the US and ASDA a British supermarket chain. Managers regard "clutter" as an obstacle ather than an aid to work. "Workers are confused. They know that creating clutter is an essential part of the way they work, but they are made to feel guilty about it." Journalists at the Economist like the "complex ecology" of their desks "undisturbed by the fads and fancies that sweep through the rest of business life".

The Economist says workers are confused and:

"There are plenty of parasites who make a living out of this confusion. Jeffrey Mayer, for instance, exhorts people to "Get rid of the clutter! Save time! Become more productive!" in his book "Winning the Fight Between You and Your Desk". The Economist sarcastically says: "The book is endorsed by Barry Greenberg, president of Chemex Industries: no doubt the Chrome finish Autoflush Valve for Urinals and Toilets, advertised as his most exciting new product on his website, has benefited from the insights in this oeuvre".

"During the 1990s, technological change lent authority to the familiar prejudice against clutter. Clutter, after all, was paper, and paper was old fashioned. Paper has no memory; paper cannot be networked. As digital devices began to talk to each other, as computers of different sizes and shapes with different purposes proliferated, the persistent popularity of a means of communication that had been around for 6,000 years became increasingly irritating to the guardians of the Zeitgeist."

Paul Saffo's 1992 paper  "The Electronic Pinata: A Paperless Future is Waiting in the Wings" is quoted again - but this time with less espect. "Digital paper and sushi computers [ones you can roll up] ... will become business realities after this decade is over."

Bosses tried to impose the papereless vision on employees. Chiat / Day an American Advertising agency "realised employees minds were trapped by paper. ... They were, accordingly, installed in offices without desks or filing cabinets. There were sofas to sit on and a few special rooms for meetings. There was nowhere to keep any paper; indeed, nobody was supposed to keep paper."

"Chiat/Day's employees behaved like any group of refugees torn from familiar surroundings. They tried to rebuild their world. One woman bought a child's red wagon, put ther paper files in it and trailed it around the corridors after her. Most people recreated their desks in the boots of their cars, where they stored their files and notebooks, dashing in and out of the building to the parking lot during meetings. Groups of workers took permanent control of meeting rooms and a shanty-town of desks grew up. The company was eventually bought by a traditionalist rival and normal life resumed."

Apparently the British government committed £200m in 2001 to developing a paperless school. "Baroness Ashton of Upholland, launching the scheme, waved a paper and pencil around, predicting their eventual demise."

Air Traffic Control

The Economists writer is impressed by Sellen and Harper, leading off with the air-traffic example:

"The business of monitoring incoming aircraft and predicting their future course, which depends on measurement and mathematics, sounds as though it should be entirely electronic. Yet paper remains an essential part of the air-traffic control system in Britain." ... "Many attempts have been made to get rid of the flight progress strips. the only way of doing away with them, it turns out, is to give air traffic controllers smaller areas to cover. For larger areas - which means a more complex job - the paper strips are essential. 'They are a jolly efficient means of annotating information,' says Richard Wright of Britain's National Air Traffic Services. 'The controllers can read them at a glance. If we replace them it will have to be with something better. They will be with us for some time yet.' "

"Paper's importance to the air-traffic controllers illustrates some of the reasons why it survives. It can be annotated more easily than text on a screen can; those marks can be seen more easily by several people than can digits on a screen; and it can be moved around, thus conveying more information."

The IMF

On Sellen and Harper's investigation at the International Monetary Fund:

"It is less surprising, perhaps, that the International Monetary Fund, which Mr Harper and Ms Sellen also spent some time studying, should still use a certain amount of paper. But, given how technology-rich the Fund is - it had spent over $70m on IT in five years at the time of their study, and was spending $18,000 per head per year - its reliance on paper is somewhat unexpected. The 25 workers (16 economists, seven administrative workers and two research assistants) whom Mr Harper and Ms Sellen studied spent 97% of their time working on documents of some sort; of that, 86% of the time was spent working on paper. They liked paper because they could spread it around; because they could annotate colleagues' work without interfering with the text, as they would if they annotated electronically; and because paper interfered less with communication during a meeting than screens would."

Harper and Sellen set up an experiment where ten people were asked to summarise reports, five of them using paper and five using screens. Those using paper spread it around, flicked through and annotated it. Those using screens created a number of windows on their screens but found scrolling, clicking and dragging slow and cumbersome and several got quite cross.
 

The Economist article also cites Alison Kidd's paper "The Marks are on the Knowledge Worker". Kidd makes a distinction (which has become popular) between:

clerical workers - who use information to aid the smooth working of a company
"knowledge workers - who use information to change themselves

Knowledge workers take notes not in order to store information, but because the process of note-taking helps them to learn. Notes are arely eviewed. Edwin Hutchins, a psychologist, reports in a study of esearch workers "The Technology of Team Navigation" that whilst 64% kept their notes for years 44% hardly ever returned to them.

"The realtionship between workers and their clutter is similar. People spread stuff over their desks not because they are too lazy to file it, but because the paper serves as a physical representation of what is going on in their heads - "a temporary holding pattern for ideas and inputs which they cannot yet categorise or even decide how they might use", as Ms Kidd puts it. The clutter cannot be filed because it has not been categorised. By the time the worker's ideas have taken form, and the clutter could be categorised, it has served its purpose and can therefore be binned. Filing it is a waste of time."

Steve Whittaker and Julia Hirschberg's paper "The Character, Value and Management of Personal Paper Archives (ATT Labs Research) suggests that "clutter may actually be quite an efficient organising principle." they examine a distinction between "filers" and "pilers" made by MIT's Tom Malone.

Filers get paperwork and put it away. They tend to file too much because they have put so much effort into building a filing system and they often find it hard to remember how they categorised things.

Pilers get paperwork and put it in concentric circles around them. There is a "hot area" of stuff being dealth with right now, a warm area for stuff to be dealt with in the next few days and it may be kept partly as a prompt. There is a cold area at the edges of the desk that could just as well be in an archive - or the bin.

Whittaker & Hirschberg find the assumption that filers can find stuff more quickly is wrong. Filers "are less likely to access a given piece of data and more likely to aquire extraneous data ... In moderation, piling has the benefits of providing somewhat ready access to materials as well as reminding about tasks currently in progress."

Managers keen on computerisation could undermine the efficiency they are aiming for. "If they interfere with people's desktops, they may also interfer with their thinking. Trying to force workers to get rid of clutter and scan their papers into a computer system may be an expensive waste of time. Companies which do this may find they create large, useless databases full of information that nobody ever uses." Harper & Sellen give an example of this from a British telecoms manufacturer whose attempt to automate the sales database went well technically but the information put in by the salesmen was vague to the point of useless. "Manager had thought that salesmen relied on detailed notes about the nature of the customers organisation and its likely requirements. Actually, the important information was about people in the client companies - their hobbies and interests, their personal characteristics, and about who to avoid dealing with. It wasn't stuff the salesmen wanted to put on a database".

Police forces found the same when they issued constables with laptop computers to take notes and statements from witnesses. The quality of statements deteriorated because writing in a computer gets in the way of talking to somebody.
 
 

Economist Article 
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WebXpress has an article 24th April 2006 "The Myth of the Paperless office" which makes no mention of Sellen and Harper but has a nice succinct summary of the merits of paper. 
 

ACM list of citations