So you can fly the Enterprise from a PADD, and you can change the interface, or what it's connected to, and interface with the rest of the ship, and yet ...
... when handing over several reports, they handed over several PADDs
You could write a little essay on the subject of props and what they are for. It would be a meditation on questions like why is it so much more dramatically effective to have two characters fight for possession of a gun than it is to have them shoot magic lightning at each other from their fingertips?
Or you could write an essay on all the things that neophiles forget when they declare war on paper. The good news is that Malcolm Gladwell wrote that already:
...in the form of a review of an MIT press book on the subject.
Or we could just make a list of why one would use several PADDs if PADDs were free. You can juxtapose two reports on a desk and rapidly glance from one to another. (Paging Edward Tufte, who goes on and on about this.) You can walk into a room with five people and hand one report to the first four and the remaining three reports to the last one. When you do hand over a stack of reports, they can be in priority order. And you can add commentary to the reports via the way you hand over each one: A careful two-handed presentation (note the proper technique for exchanging Japanese business cards), a jumbled stack, a light toss, a disgusted look as you gingerly pinch the report between thumb and forefinger, or even a mock attempt to shield the bad-news report behind your body as you hand over the good news first. See? Props are not just for actors; everyone is an actor and we all use props.
I voted up, but I'm going to breach HN brevity protocol to comment that that Gladwell article is really, really worth reading. E.g.
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. Kidd writes that many of the people she talked to use the papers on their desks as contextual cues to "recover a complex set of threads without difficulty and delay" when they come in on a Monday morning, or after their work has been interrupted by a phone call. What we see when we look at the piles on our desks is, in a sense, the contents of our brains.
I've let a response percolate while doing other things. I suppose I shouldn't respond without actually rereading the whole article (I referenced it based on memory). I'll let the tags notion stew a bit longer.
Is your project public? I'd be curious to see what else is in it, and how you are applying tags there.
Tags are a great alternative or adjunct to a hierarchical, single-node organization. The largest problems I've encountered with tagging are cumbersome and/or overly limiting implementations.
Or instead of handing over PADDs at all you can simply tell the intended recipient that the report is ready and they can tap the screen and read it on their own customised display. They can call up multiple reports side by side, etc, etc.
Yes, I understand and appreciate your points, and I, personally, use more paper and physical means of thinking and reasoning than many of my colleagues. That doesn't mean that the original ST people got it entirely right (as some people seem to claim). Handing over PADDs only gets part of the story right, and part of the story wrong.
I look forward to the 24th century to see how these things really do get used.
(And thanks for the reference to the Gladwell article - I'll read that later - it may get into my "Great Articles" library.)
Unless the other four people "forget" (come unprepared) to bring their PADDs to the office meeting, in which case, handing out the report is still the lowest tech to synchronizing a meeting. I understand your point, but people and meetings... </rant>
The persistence of paper indicates nothing more than a failure of existing software, not of concept.
The biggest shortfall is that computers do not allow arbitrary input at arbitrary times. You have to prime them to accept a certain type of input, which takes a wasteful amount of time.
Further, you are then typically locked into a certain rigid type of input, which may not be appropriate. E.g. The default for text entry boxes is to only allows text, not annotation, so work that involves annotation is poorly suited to most text entry software. Similarly, post-it applications tend not to allow arbitrary diagrams, even though that may be the most effective way to record a note.
There's no reason it must be that way, it just tends to be, because thoughtless software development is cheaper and easier.
Paperless certainly isn't feasible for everyone today. But that doesn't make it unattainable. And let's not pretend for a moment that just because pure paperless isn't feasible for many, that a dramatic reduction isn't possible. Despite the remaining valid uses, the overwhelming majority of paper produced is pure waste.
As for the 'acting' commentary you cite, that isn't omitted in a paperless future. It's absolutely preserved in the context of the visual/textual exchange of sending someone an email with the report as attachment/link/etc.
If anything, it's amplified by the asynchronous nature of drafting the message; you're forced to think about its presentation and have the time to give it the right delivery; versus a time/space-constrained physical exchange.
I agree that existing software has failings, and I certainly agree that a push toward not archiving paper is worthwhile and that the technology is there. (I installed my Fujitsu ScanSnap yesterday. It's a dream. I'm expecting it to work great with Dropbox, Evernote, and iPad.)
But we can only blame software so much. There's a failure of existing hardware as well. Much of that is a failure to be sufficiently cheap. I can cover a desk in six layers of 300dpi paper for a few dollars. To cover a desk in 300dpi display is still prohibitively expensive, for now.
But there's also a failure of hardware to leverage human nature. We have stacks of highly-designed wetware designed for working with tangible objects that fit in our hands and can be moved through space. A collection of Post-it notes plugs right into our psychology. But most electronics lives in its world, not ours. We peer into the world of our computers through little glass windows. At least the new multitouch interfaces let us put our fingers on the windows, but there's a lot of room for improvement. Literally entire dimensions' worth of room for improvement.
Paper is cheap today, but becomes a more expensive choice.
You have to figure in the implied costs of transporting, storing, archiving, searching, referencing, etc.
That's why, much as legitimate uses of paper have persisted, they have done so only within areas of local creation: paper tickers don't leave the air traffic bullpen, annotated papers don't leave the desks of their authors, post-it notes rarely leave the desk, etc.
In short: software is failing creators, and that's where paper persists. After the process of creation --during recording, transportation, storage, reference, indexing, etc-- paper is already dead.
Software is meeting creators cost-benefit considerations. If and when full-desk displays with dozens of GPUs become as cheap as a normal workstation, then the software will emerge to transfer things seamlessly between different workstations. Until then, paper is much cheaper. Even when free, software is not cheap, especially in time needed to assimilate it into your workflow.
Paper has been around for centuries without significantly changing in form or function. Over that time, many stable conventions evolved for organizing information on paper and using paper as a medium communication.
Its digital equivalents are still immature - we don't yet have common expectations of how we share the same types of information digitally. The underlying forms are still changing rapidly, and the decisions we make in how we communicate are therefore more coarse. We don't think about the minute details of how we put out different bits of information in order when we first need to settle whether we're going to use email attachments or files on Dropbox or Google docs, or send an IM, etc.
Eventually, conventions will stabilize as certain types of information become strongly tied to particular methods of representation and communication. Once those become stable contexts, we will be able to vary the more minute details within each context to carry metadata in the same way Tufte does with paper.
This situation demonstrates an interesting (current) weakness with using technology to manage information. When your organizational systems, methods, and conventions are purely conceptual, it's very easy to change and adapt them in real time, allowing for a gradual evolution of processes, and progression towards nuanced equilibria. But when we rely on software, we may often need to write new code to support a new idea - we increase the upfront investment needed for experimentation, often drastically. And people who are non-technical can't experiment and adapt on their own at all. Until most people can adapt their digital tools as easily as their physical ones, it may take much, much longer to optimize their effectiveness.
The one explanation I read on a Star Trek site once (Can't remember excactly where), was that the PADDs basically were a sign of capitulation from information overload: Instead of trying to store relevant information in huge central databases and sending around links, you would store it on a PADD and physically give it to the recipient. Therefore giving the information some... well, weight.
It's one thing for the designers of the prop to talk about the possibilities amongst themselves - and remember it thusly - and another for the director to request that multiple physical devices are passed around to represent multiple reports, for the sake of making the storytelling clear.
I have on several occasions attempted to make a user interface that looked and felt like the okudagrams[1] in ST:TNG or DS9. My conclusion is that they are a stunningly bad use of space and a terrible way to direct user attention. If only they didn't look so cool I would stop trying.
I think now that I sometimes need to display an iPhone's worth of information on an iPad the day of the okudagram has come.
[1]okudagram – Okudagram is a nickname for the interactive (and usually reorganizable) displays found on control panels in 23rd and 24th century starships, and beyond. The nickname is a reference to Michael Okuda, a tech advisor for the show, who created definitive signage styles for a new design of control panel, without any physical controls, that was used in the later Star Trek Movies and TNG era productions.
This actually opens a profound issue: why has progress in areas like computers and biotech been so breakneck fast but has utterly stalled in areas like energy, propulsion, aviation, etc.?
I think I know the answer: those fields are capital intensive, so their "generation time" is very slow. But that might not be the only answer.
It seems to me that progress in computers is much more incremental. Meaning, step N+1 is pretty well visible from step N. When dealing with energy and propulsion, this does not seem to be the case. I realize this is pretty hand-wavy, but it's how I get myself to sleep.
For every person who chooses to dive into computing and biotech, that's one more person who cannot work on energy, propulsion and aviation. I know I for one would probably do one of those if I wasn't in computing.
Maybe it's that the job market in computers especially is so much more dynamic with better opportunity for advancement, so it attracts a greater share of the best and the brightest.
It might also be accessibility. Anyone can play with a computer. A jet engine, not so much.
... when handing over several reports, they handed over several PADDs