. . . muttered the ogre

In the New Yorker, a review of The Myth of the Paperless Office. (Link from Monty Solomon on a private list.)

Paper enables a certain kind of thinking. Picture, for instance, the top of your desk. . . . The piles look like a mess, but they aren’t. When a group at Apple Computer studied piling behavior several years ago, they found that even the most disorderly piles usually make perfect sense to the piler, and that office workers could hold forth in great detail about the precise history and meaning of their piles. . . .

But why do we pile documents instead of filing them? Because piles represent the process of active, ongoing thinking. The psychologist Alison Kidd, whose research Sellen and Harper refer to extensively, argues that “knowledge workers” use the physical space of the desktop to hold “ideas which they cannot yet categorize or even decide how they might use.” The messy desk is not necessarily a sign of disorganization. It may be a sign of complexity: those who deal with many unresolved ideas simultaneously cannot sort and file the papers on their desks, because they haven’t yet sorted and filed the ideas in their head. . . .

It is pleasant to have my inability to classify my papers ratified – rationalized? – by a scientific authority figure.

Of course a desktop (even extended to the floor) is a limited space. Perhaps the killer app for VR will be bigger offices, with unlimited space for small tables among which one can ‘walk’ to find the right pile of papers. (For better visual memory cues, the space ought to have some arbitrary shape features: tables of different sizes and heights, wall decor and so on.)

But I’ll probably still wish for an AI assistant to help organize the stuff.