Years ago, I read Richard Harper and Abigail Sellen’s Myth of the Paperless Office. For me, it’s like Annie Hall or Houses of the Holy or David Brownlee’s modern architecture class: it’s one of those works that blows you away when you first encounter it, and still resonates years later. Almost immediately after reading the book, I started thinking about how paper media and their affordances are used– usually quite unself-consciously– by futurists in expert workshops.

The result is an article titled “Paper Spaces: Visualizing the Future.” Like many of my articles, it’s taken an unseemly amount of time to get into press, but it’s finally coming out this spring in World Futures Review. A PDF of the latest draft is available here.

Here’s the big argument, from the introduction:

We tend to think of space as irrelevant in creative work, or at best only indirectly influential: for example, architects may use a mix of open office plans, natural lighting, and bold colors to create stimulating, useful workspaces. But for workshops, and for the kinds of visual processes that many futurists use, the relationship between space, ideas, and creativity is much more intimate. Ideas are embodied in materials; they become cognitive and physical spaces that literally surround groups; and the process of creating those spaces can promote a sense of group identity and common vision for the future.

I use the term “paper spaces” to describe these environments, and to highlight several things. First, we’re used to thinking of things made of paper as physical objects whose qualities help shape the experience of reading, but it’s useful to pay attention to their spatial and architectural qualities as well. Large visuals aren’t just things: they’re spaces that possess some of the qualities of desks or offices. Workshops exploit their scale and physicality to promote social activity between workshop participants. In this case, the spatiality of paper is fairly self-evident; but many of our interactions with paper, books, and writing have a spatial quality. Scholars could gain much by analyzing print media using conceptual tools from architecture, design, and human-computer interaction, as well as literary theory and book history.

Second, it warns us against taking too passive or formal a view of visual tools in business, of treating them like paintings on a wall. In the way users interact with them– they’re annotated, extended, argued over, and played with– they’re more like Legos than landscapes. The process of creating maps, and the maps themselves, both reflect a set of attitudes about how to understand and prepare for the future, one that emphasizes user involvement, and the need for actors to develop and possess shared visions of the future. (Ironically, there may be more studies of large interactive displays and other digital media, than of the old media they’re meant to displace. )

Third, the term “paper spaces” highlights their hybrid, ephemeral quality. They work because they’re simultaneously interactive media and workspace, but their lives are brief and easy to overlook: they are designed to support idea- and image-making, but leave little trace of themselves…. [Despite this, though,] paper spaces are ubiquitous: most of our interactions with texts and other media have a spatial dimension that affects the ways we read, think, and create.