The more-paper office

Wednesday 1st May 2002

Like the hovercraft and videophone, the paperless office has been a stock standard vision of the future. So, why are we drowning in hard copy?

Talk about paperless office-capable. Unlimited's publisher uses Microsoft Office and Lotus Notes, both of which allow for detailed, all-digital revision tracking. You've probably got a ton of document management and collaboration software, too.

Yet around our colour laser you'll always find a queue, complete with regular outbursts of printer rage. And our desks groan under piles of printouts.

Some companies, like the maniacally focused Microsoft, have made progress. In his book Business at the Speed of Thought, Bill Gates relates how Microsoft was awash in a sea of hundreds of paper forms, for recording everything from expenses to overtime to requistions. A sustained war on unnecessary printouts saw all but 30 or so of those forms transformed from paper to online-only format.

Not everybody has that -discipline. Since I became New Zealand PC World editor in 1995, it's seemed like the pile of paper on my desk has been swelling out of control. I asked HP, the world's largest printer maker, whether I was imagining things. Nope - you bet your toner cartridge it's been growing. Since 1995, our consumption of uncoated free-sheet (standard office paper, that is) has increased by about 15%.

Rather than confining documents to neat and tidy web pages, the internet has been fuelling our love affair with reams of A4. According to an HP report (which itself runs to around half a kilo of hard copy), there'll be more and more printouts in our future as we embrace the net and as document-handling software like Adobe's Acrobat gets more capable. Specifically, HP thinks that email and (many) high-quality printouts will replace the single document sent by courier.

At Sydney's Sheraton on the Park, for example, a trial scheme lets you choose one of several newspapers from around the world (including old granny Herald) and print out all, or selected, pages in Acrobat PDF format. Throw in the rise of fast in-room web connectivity and teeny-tiny portable colour printers like Canon's 49mm-high BJC 50 (or HP's own DeskJet 350) and you get an ink-filled vision of the future; the business traveller who sits in her hotel room, printing newspapers, documents and web pages until her suite resembles the paper mountain she left in the office.

Believe it or not, this is a good thing.

It's the psychology, stupid

There are physiological reasons that make people lean toward hard copy. Aside from the obvious tactile advantages, the average person reads text 20% faster from a sheet of paper than they do from a PC screen.

But there are more important psychological reasons. In The Myth of the Paperless Office (available through Amazon.com), social scientists Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper relate their quest to discover why the International Monetary Fund is buried under a mountain of paper. The pair reckon that computers have solved the 19th century problem of how to store documents en masse. And the internet is good for shuffling them around. At the end of the day, that's what most document management software is about, too.

But the reason we print 40% more documents in the age of email (by Sellen and Harper's calculation) is that paper is really about thinking and interactive collaboration. Sure, some software lets you mark annotations, but you lose the nuance of the handwritten comment. Is it underlined? Does it look stressed? Frantic? Encouraging?

People almost never read a document sequentially. A printout gives a collaborator a strong sense of what parts of a document a colleague has thumbed through (or not).

Paper also has spatial advantages: you can fan it out around you, or lay it end to end, helping you to visualise the end product, or get the big picture in a literal as well as figurative sense.

A printout makes a document, and hence discussion around it, more tangible. Sellen and Harper apply several ethnographic and cognitive psychology tools to prove that paper is essential for drawing people into a truly collaborative project. But their overall message is simple: stop fighting and learn to love paper (they make a strong case for the messy desk, too, whose anarchic storage system usually makes perfect sense to its owner, and indeed reflects the way they think about each project). Paper documents should complement your company's efforts to better store and index documents, not be replaced by them.

Towards e-paper

So, we still need paper. But is there a way to make the paper itself smarter?

A couple of years back, IBM flew me to an annual bash called ThinkPad council, in which large customers and IT journos weighed in on prototype designs.

One widget really caught my eye: a leather folio thing that opened to reveal a laptop-style screen and keyboard on one side, and real paper on the other - only with a special pen that not only wrote, with real ink, but also captured your doodlings to hard disk. "Yes! Yes! Make it! Make it!" I cried. I promised to buy one, and raised the strong possibility that all journalists and other mobile paper mashers would do the same.

In late 2001, this device finally made it to market, branded the ThinkPad TransNote. A review unit landed in our Auckland office, and I still thought it was neat - but I didn't buy one. Neither did anybody else, and the TransNote was deleted from the IBM catalogue in February, which must be something of a record. IBM hasn't invited me back.

Digital ink

Other attempts to put the extra "e" in e-paper continue unabated. Those that centre around the paper itself, rather than a smart pen, show the most promise.

For companies like E Ink, the Holy Grail is electronic paper that shares all the tactile benefits of paper made from trees, but is injected with electronic smarts that make it reusable and instantly adaptable. The promise: genuine paper-to-PC collaboration; newspapers that refresh with each day's news; flashing, "ink on the move" billboards; even clothes.

On a computer screen, text or images are made up of tiny dots called pixels. With E Ink's roll-up e-paper, the pixels' place is taken by thousands of tiny pigment chips, each the width of a human hair (a sheet is 0.8mm thick, and an individual sheet is as small as a postage stamp). The e-paper is dark blue, but selected pigment chips can be turned white with a positive charge to create an image.

Problems remain. Most people want more than two colours, and higher resolution that today's e-paper can provide (E Ink's current products offer an extremely low two to three dots per inch; a PC monitor is 70dpi, a publishable picture 300dpi). E-paper that didn't need two AA batteries would be good, too.

Meanwhile, Xerox says it has chosen 3M to commercialise Gyricon, the e-paper product developed in its famed Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) - although so far there's nothing usable, or cheap enough, to sell through stationery shops. Looks like we'll be scribbling on Post-It notes for a while longer.

Chris Keall
chris_keall@idg.co.nz

Comments from our readers

No comments yet