The Myth of the Paperless Office

Paper remote: an augmented television guide and remote control

“…These properties are related to the properties of the physical paper that have been studied and noticed by many researchers during the last two decades [62,47,73,48,56]. Furthermore, the participants improved navigation by manipulating the pages such as folding corners, marking pages, or making annotations in the paper guide.…”

“…Sellen and Harper (2001), for example, found that paper artifacts have important roles in office work (e.g., supporting collaboration). Further, four key properties of paper that support the flexible interweaving of reading and writing were identified [62]. First, the paper is physically flexible.…”

“…1. From an interaction standpoint, paper-based media provide many advantages that are difficult to capture in a traditional graphical-user interface (GUI) [62]. For example, a single sheet of paper can hold much information owing to its superior screen resolution compared to GUIs and TV screens.…”

Communication and Human Factors

“…Hartson (2003) extended the concept's domain by distinguishing cognitive, physical, sensory, and functional affordances. For example, paper has many different affordances, especially in combination with other technologies (such as pens or thumbtacks), supporting a wide variety of human actions (Sellen and Harper, 2003). Paper documents allow readers to make notes or other marks on them, allow flexible navigation and manipulation, allow users to position or lay out the paper for different purposes, view material in much greater resolution than on-screen, are tangible (involving hands, eyes, and varying position), facilitate the coordination of action among organizational members, provide a medium for information gathering and exchange, support discussion, allow annotation for later discussion, provide a medium for organizing one's thoughts and work processes, and enable storage of information for multiple people, groups, locations, and time periods.…”

“…Using a vertical display for group interaction tends to create an authorial atmosphere, with someone controlling the display as a teacher or lecturer; however, horizontal tabletop displays "provide a natural centre for interaction to take place around and encourages collaboration between the users" (Stahl and Wallberg, 2004, p. 53). The location and formatting of office paper (such as binders, or Post-It notes) can signal whether someone should attend to it quickly or whether it can be shared (Sellen and Harper, 2003). Longterm use of video-mediated communication can foster complex patterns of interaction constrained by the features and structures of the new medium (Dourish et al, 1996).…”