Towards the Paperless Office : Ecology of artifacts at work

Abstract

Stepping one step closer to the paperless office by looking into existing technologies.

Looking at the whole ecology of digital artifacts of users. Only by understanding how people use paper, how they relate to their digital ecology of artifacts, and what makes them adopt new products can we hope to get one step closer to the paperless office.

There has been an extreme growth in mobile devices the last couple of year, and there have been a couple of new platforms emerging in the mobile ecology. This spark in multiple devices at the office leads to new ways of looking at how the existing ecology of digital artifacts can support some of the affordances of paper. The new emerging platforms transform the concept of compatibility in the mobile ecology. Because of this the earlier thought on what the limitation of the existing technologies are not that relevant any more. The problem seem to lie more in the way people deal with context and labeling and how this leads to consumers use of digital artifacts in a sequential manner.