Monday, 2nd December 1996

Towards a paperless world

Computers and ergonomics of paper as a medium

by Christopher G D Tipper <chris.tipper@hotmail.co.uk>

WORKING IN Cyberspace in the 21st century? The world will be at our fingertips. Computers will remove the obstacles that have blocked economic development in the past. Barriers of communication will disappear. We will be able to exchange information at will with anyone on the planet. Social barriers will disintegrate in the new classless Dataspace. Individual innovation will be rewarded regardless of local economic factors. Timely information widely available will make people better informed to make the choices affecting their lives. Democracy on the Athenian model, with every citizen having direct access to the machinery of government. Peace and prosperity will rule the globe. The long promised Golden Millennium.

This is the promise anyway. Heralding the call for this utopia are the more muted claims of the people who would bring us the ‘Paperless Office’. Every person has seen the mountain paper that the ‘computer-revolution’ seems to have wrought. Everybody has noted the completely wasteful exercise needed every time a fax message is to be sent. Wouldn’t it be nice to short-circuit that process by plugging the fax machine directly into the computer? What about the pointless process one must go through every time a draft copy of a document is to be reviewed? Why can’t programmers quite seem to produce a true WYSIWYG [1] word-processor? Even the Macintosh Word 4.0 seems to have problems identifying the correct printer settings. Wouldn’t it be absolutely perfect if we could get rid of paper completely and forget about WYSIWYG, printer set-up strings, down-loadable fonts, print-queues and all the other paraphernalia of paper?

In fact I won’t address the issue directly. I’ll just try to outline some of the factors that make our present technology so efficient. And then it will become apparent what some of the major obstacles are to the widespread use of computers and, particularly, overcoming Ted Nelson’s ‘tyranny of paper’.

Newspapers—Although newspaper sales as a proportion of the population are surprisingly small, what is clear is that, while not obviously popular, they are the most efficient way of disseminating reporting, analysis, opinion and other timely information. One of the most important aspects of a newspaper is its browsability. With vast swathes of textual and graphical information available in a sweep of the eye, it makes it very easy to assess and evaluate the reporting without committing yourself to detailed study. First you scan the headlines. Then if one catches your eye you read the first few lines of the article. Maybe it is only of peripheral interest to you and you skim through the article, hopping and skipping from sentence to sentence. Then without a moment’s thought you jump to another article at the opposite side of the page. Maybe after scanning the headlines you organised the articles in your mind into a simple list of priorities. Maybe something on the page catches your eye and you dynamically reorder your priority list. Maybe you have a sudden urge to read the humour column so you stick your thumb in to mark the page and skip elsewhere. All these things create what Heidegger characterises as the readiness-to-hand. The whole essence of the newspaper is to provide as wide a bandwidth between you and the journalists of the newspaper. Large pages, clear typefaces, intimacy, portability and above all cost all factor into making the newspaper a singularly effective source of information. To really emulate this with other technology is a matter of science fiction. To my mind we already have an optimal solution to a basic need. We are really going to have to reinvent the wheel on this one.
Libraries—If you’ve ever used a large technical library you’ll know what I mean about the ‘serendipity’ factor. You go in into a library with an idea of something interesting. You maybe have a particular author in mind. You look up the title in the index and go to the allotted shelf. But on the way you pass a shelf on a subject that interests you and may even be related in some poorly defined way to what you are looking for. You decide that it fulfils your needs more closely and you decide to check out the surrounding books. You suddenly find that you have discovered a goldmine of information that you never would have found if you had relied on indexing alone (computer or otherwise). Thus the physical layout of the books in the library has enabled you to achieve results that wouldn’t have been possible, even if the entire collection of books had been stored electronically and catalogued in the most consistent and exact of ways. For the simple reason is that every judgment that is made by the indexing system has to be made ultimately by a human-being. And every judgment that is made is highly subjective under the best of circumstances. So nothing beats the existence of a good library. Nothing electronic, short of a virtual library [2] , with virtual hypertexts (the ultimate pop-up book!) will substitute for a good, old fashioned papyro-centric library. So again we’ll have to reinvent the wheel.
Note-taking—This is a very personal activity. Some people will create highly structured ‘minutes’ of a meeting, with headings and sub-headings. It will be quite detailed, with lots of quotes, and may not contain any graphical content whatsoever. This person thinks and acts like a computer. Another person will write all over the page at once. There will be a lot of flow-type diagrams with arrows, comments in the margins, important points with frames drawn around them, personalised abbreviations, maybe even cartoons in a corner where the meeting got slow. This person is very likely to be thinking actively about what is being said, and committing his thoughts to paper in an ideographical sort of way. A personalised language if you like. The last thing that is on his mind is ‘Now how the hell am I going to get my computer to understand this?’. In fact he would be very surprised if his wife understood what he had written. Now it is not necessary for his notes to be machine readable. But given that, what are the possible advantages to be gained by using computer technology? How can a computer aid in the basic process of taking notes about a meeting, or thoughts about a new product or even notes for a new book? Well, in my view these are all tasks that require very little interaction from the underlying medium. The important requirements are that the medium is very transparent. The essence of a piece of paper is that it provides a space which has a tactile quality to it. The loop between the brain and the hand is allowed free reign to express itself with practically no breakdown. The resolution is high (limited only by the eye), friction between the nib and paper is just right for proper control, it is possible to twist the page around to operate from a different angle (to draw a ‘vertical’ line, say). Above all it offers a physical frame within which you can organise your thoughts. It makes no assumptions about the content or form of the marks you made. It just lets you get on with it. Again we have this powerful concept of readiness-to-hand. There are certain things a computer could do to aid this process. For a start it allows you to move graphical objects around on the display area. It gives you a much larger virtual page. It allows you to clean and tidy up the marks you have made, to improve the appearance. But if you make such a complete mess the best solution is to just file that slip of paper in the rubbish bin. And it is incredibly difficult to highlight (for moving) irregular blocks of the page by free-hand. The best approach is to erase a whole chunk and redraw it somewhere else. Remember that I am talking about a highly specific, personalised sort of information here. There is no question that this is the sort of thing you would want to disseminate to all your friends (in which case a computer/fax would be ideal). Nor is it the sort of thing you want to file away and recall after a lengthy period of time. The worst-case scenario for this type of data is the end-of-year exams. After that it is disposable nappies.
Intimacy—This is an expression coined by Alan Kay, the man who created the pioneering DynaBook concept. Not amenable to easy definition it describes a relationship between an information medium and the user of that medium. Paper is the most intimate medium known to man. You can fold it up and stick it in your wallet, where it gets sat on and crumpled. It requires no power, it is non-volatile, it is practically free and it requires no instruction manual. You can take it to the beach, where there is lots of fine sand to clog up the works of more delicate technology and it is not likely going to suffer from sun-spot activity. Most importantly nobody else is going to be able eavesdrop on you. It is there, it is non-responsive, but what the hell—it is not going to crash every time it sees the word ‘shit’.

Now my argument is not against computers. Not for a second. They are by far the most stunning technological leap-forward since the invention of the wheel. My argument is against the people who would have us believe that we are going to be able to re-invent everything that has been used before in the process of creating and disseminating information—letters, post-it notes, books, newspapers, personal records. In my opinion it is going to be decades before the paperless office comes about. And paper will never be eradicated. The only real way that paper could be replaced is through virtual reality technology. It will be a direct computer- choreographed simulation of a virtual world in which there is a digital analogue of paper. You will be able to pick up virtual sheets and write on them. You will be able to flip through the pages of a virtual book (or wade through its three-dimensional analogue). You will be able to scan stacks of books in a virtual library. A newspaper would be very much the same also. If you think about it, the size is very much an optimal solution to the trade-off between immediacy and access. You want to be able to find everything quickly (therefore an orderly sequence of sections) but also be able to find everything with a single sweep of the eye. So all these virtual worlds would possess objects that are very similar to what we use now. As always the benefits are going to be judged on economic grounds. Virtual reality will only take-off if it can be shown to be not only more productive than what we have now, but also cheaper. So with this in mind I made a simple calculation. [3] RAM is falling in cost with a half-life of 3 years by Gordon Moore’s law. The question is, how long will it be before RAM is as cost-effective a means of storing information as compared to paper? By my estimate, RAM is £50 per Mbyte. So in 3 years time it will be £25 per Mbyte by conventional-wisdom. Meanwhile, how much is paper worth? Well a medium cost paper is the sort that is sold as A4 pads in the newsagent. At a rough estimate that is £1.50 per 200 leafs. That makes it 0.75p per page. High quality laser paper is more, and newsprint is much less. So this is somewhere in the middle. Bear in mind that I’m not taking into account the cost of printing, so the estimate is biased slightly in favour of paper. How much information can you store on a piece of paper? I will make two estimates.

Premise 1: A page consists of 60 lines, of 10 words of 5 characters per word, one byte per character. This gives a total of 3000 bytes.

Premise 2: A page consists of a space of 10 inches by 7 inches with a printing resolution of 1200 dots per inch (which amounts to low resolution typeset quality print—magazine quality is about 2400 dots per inch) and eight dots are represented by a byte. This gives a total of 12Mbytes of information on one page. Such an amount is not unreasonable if one wants to create the quality of a piece of paper to the user.

Now the simple question is: how long will it take for RAM to cost the same as a piece of paper, in terms of information storage? After judicious use of a few logarithms you come up with the answer. Premise 1: Under this premise it is going to be 12.8 years before computer memory becomes as cost efficient as paper. Premise 2: It will take 49 years to reach cost parity. There are numerous criticisms of this argument.

The paper actually costs money to print it, so memory should be relatively cheaper.
Computer memory requires power, so should be relatively more costly.
Most information is stored on magnetic or optical disk anyway, which is a lot cheaper than memory.
If you think hard enough you can always make memory cheaper than paper—it all depends on what you want to store. Even pictures can be stored as graphical objects rather than bit-maps, like Postscript for instance.
Computer memory is so flexible, it makes no sense to compare it with a sheet of paper. It is not just an information storage medium, but a ‘live’ data area, with constantly changing patterns of information.

This is to confuse the medium with the active element, which does not operate within the memory, but on it (i.e. the CPU). But all this denies, in my opinion, what is the crucial issue. What we are trying to do is emulate the readiness-to-hand, the intimate nature of paper as a medium for interaction with yourself and others. This is a much, much more sophisticated requirement than simply keeping a record of sales of Widget X in a wholesale warehouse. So what I am arguing is that while the artificial office may eventually happen, it is going to require enormous leaps in technology before doing so. And it is a debatable issue whether the effort is justified, on both economic and ergonomic grounds. Stop

Endnotes:

[1] WYSIWYG—What You See Is What You Get

[2] Virtual in the sense of a three dimensional simulacrum

[3] A document expressing my calculations derived from MathCAD is to be found here.

Bibliography

Winograd, T. and Flores, C. F. (1986), “Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design”, Norwood, NJ: Ablex 1986. Reprinted by Addison-Wesley (1987).

Ryan, B. February, 1991, “Dynabook revisited with Alan Kay: is the reign of the desktop computer about to end?”, BYTE magazine. p203-208.

September, 1991, “Communications, Computers and Networks: How to Work, Play and Thrive in Cyberspace”, Scientific American Special Issue.

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