Reading with a pencil in your hand

Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper¹ observed how people in organizations use documents. They noted that the default pose for many readers was with a pen in their hand, ready to annotate the text or jot down new thoughts. In fact, their remarkable conclusion was that in the digital age paper is primarily an interactive medium, not a storage medium.

The life cycle of a document, as they observed it, moves between digital and paper versions:

• marshalling and extracting information: digital for search, paper for integrating multiple sources
• writing: paper for planning, digital for drafting
• editing/proofreading: paper
• finalizing and correcting: digital
• distribution and workflow: digital
• reading/consuming: paper better for longer documents
• archiving/filing: digital.

So paper is now a temporary interactive medium: documents are printed out for reading, annotation, comparing, and sharing – then recycled while remaining accessible in digital form. As Sellen and Harper put it:

We argue that we are not headed toward offices that use less paper but rather toward offices that keep less paper. This is because we will continue to need paper for some of the critical work activities we do, but in these roles it will be very much a temporary medium. (page 209)

This was in 2002 – quite a long time ago now, but digital channels were already well established by then. Although since that time a generation has grown up in a digital world and may have developed different habits.

But I can’t help trusting more in paper documents to be still be in my files if I want to look at them in future years. Information about my pension, for example, or legal agreements. Where are my digital documents if I don’t keep paying my subscription to DropBox or iCloud?

1. Sellen, A., & R. Harper (2002) The myth of the paperless office. MIT Press.