Paper

An embodied artefact

In 1996, Else Nygren, an Associate Professor and Director of graduate studies at Uppsala University wrote a paper on the challenges of replacing paper medical records with electronic ones.

The transition from print to digital is somewhat defining for our age, however with some expert systems ( like hospital medical records ) posing more challenges than initially expected, the paper concluded:

We must admit that the paper-based medical record is really an effective and extremely flexible information tool for the physician, and secondly, that the task of constructing a user interface to a computerized version of this tool will be difficult.

If you think of paper as an information tool, it makes perfect sense, as it has obvious downsides when compared to a digital system: paper can be easily lost or misplaced, torn or smudged and — maybe the biggest downside of all — it can only be in one place at a time.

But information tools are mostly designed to be used with the brain, not the body. And this is where the physical qualities of paper become affordances.

Paper can show wear and tear, which shows intense activity. Handwriting can show who performed what, notes and scribbling in pencil can show the thought process. Corrections and erasures are all part of the sorts of information paper can carry. What makes paper a unique kind of object and a powerful carrier of information is in the way it is being used.

A lot of information — all of it encoded in the materiality of the paper itself — is available at a glance to an experienced eye. And it is this sort of information digital systems struggle with.

Paper offers a physical experience beyond the mere transfer of information. Everything that comes with the text gets discarded in the transition to digital. The structure that expresses more than printed words, sentences or forms is missing — context is missing. That’s why a lot of studies tackling this problem end in a similar note to Else Nygren’s conclusion.

Paul Dourish uses the medical records example to talk about the relevance of embodied interaction with computational systems. Paper is an embodied artefact, it not only represents the information written on it, but it participates in the physical world in which physicians perform their activities.

Paper not only represents information, it is information.