Paperless Office, Paperless Toilet
In 1975, a Business Week article predicted that office of the future would be paperless. Hasn’t happened. According to the Environmental ProtectionAgency, each office worker produces about two pounds of paper waste every day. Even with ebooks, paperbacks and hardbound books abound. Moreover, go into any K-12 school and paper–not e-paper–is everywhere even in 1:1 laptop classrooms. Hey, even flight controllers surrounded by radar screens use paper, “flight controller strips,” to track aircraft landings and take offs. And universities, well, professors’ offices are awash in paper. Nearly four decades after the prediction, paper is with us and will continue to be with us because paper serves important cognitive needs regardless of how advanced information and communication technologies get.
Consider what Abigal Sellen and Richard Harper in The Myth of the Paperless Office wrote:
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