[The following is adopted from a piece that I wrote on HumansAndComputing.org some years ago. It relates to my ongoing advocacy for the ‘texture’ of work, and the relationship between the presence of such ‘texture’ and the creativity and productive effectiveness of individuals and teams]

Malcolm Gladwell writes in “The Social Life of Paper” that the consumption of uncoated free-sheet paper has risen nearly 15 percent between 1995 and 2000. You might think this is just a matter of our not yet having broken old media habits–of not yet having embraced the digital world. But, according to Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper, in their book Myth of the Paperless Office, there is a cognitive reason why people still prefer paper over pixels: paper provides unique affordances that computers cannot provide.

Here’s a story that Gladwell tells about air traffic controllers, who he refers to as the “quintessential knowledge workers.” Each air traffic controller uses three media: a computer radar screen, with little blips representing the planes he is responsible for; audio contact with the pilots and other controllers; little strips of paper they call “flight strips.”

Using these media, the flight controller constructs for himself a 3-D picture of all the planes he is responsible for. The construction and manipulation of artifacts within these media help the controller maintain situation awareness. On the subject of situation awareness, Mica Endsley writes:

“Situation awareness operates on three levels. One is perceiving. Second is understanding what the information means-analogous to reading comprehension. The highest level, though, is projection-the ability to predict which aircraft are coming in and when. You’ve got to be able to look into the future, probably by as much as five minutes.”

Those paper air strips are critical in helping air traffic controllers achieve situation awareness. Air traffic controllers often work in pairs, where each manipulate the strips. Movement of the strips, writing on them, etc., all play a critical part in the real-time activity of the situation awareness needed to safely land planes. Their movement act as cues which helps the controller keep the situation of his planes clear in his head. Moreover, when discussing the situation with their pairs, controllers move the strips around in order to animate various scenarios. As Gladwell observes, “The controller’s flight strips are like the piles of paper on a desk: they are the physical manifestations of what goes on inside his head.”

This, I believe, is a critical point. As human beings, we rely on aspects of our environment that are as much felt as they are thought, in order to trigger embodied memory and effective action–the quality of ‘flow,’ which Mihály Csíkszentmihályi writes so much about, which is important to forms of work requiring creativity and ingenuity.

In fact, the air-traffic-control center probably looks a lot like my office looks when I’m in a particularly creative flurry of activity: papers and piles everywhere. And yet, it is this apparent chaos that allows controllers to keep thousands of people safe each and every day.

There is movement afoot to force controllers to clean up there act-to get everything onto those nightmares of affordances: desktop computers! Expect to see an uptick in accidents and near-accidents.

Posted in: Texture, Team, Self-organization by admin on Friday, July 18th, 2008

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