Usability Views Article Details  home | timeline | recent | popular | e-reports | userati | books | about  PapierCraft: A System for Interactive Paper (15 May 2005) In an age when users are besieged by personal computers, handheld devices, tablets, smart phones, and digital watches, knowledge workers still want paper, use paper, and strongly prefer paper for many tasks. Paper is inexpensive, com-fortable to read, easy to annotate, light to carry, quick to access, and simple to use. In short, the strengths of paper are the weaknesses of the computer. While mobile devices will improve in the future, paper offers many properties that are hard to beat. The key affor-dances of paper (e.g., ease of annotation, the option to flip quickly between several documents, and the ability to dis-play large quantities of information all at once by physically spreading documents in space) are well adapted to typical knowledge gathering and crystallization tasks [25, 34]. During such active reading tasks, knowledge workers process and organize the information for later retrieval. For example, users may annotate a specific region of text with hand written notes or mark-up. The users may take notes reflecting their own understanding of the material on a separate pad, possibly including explicit references (like “See also figure 7 on page 23”). Users can literally cut and paste information between documents, attach post-it notes, or join two separate documents by placing them side by side. These notations and physical arrangements represent an implicit web of links between multiple documents, all of which is unfortunately trapped in the physical world. Thus, it is difficult for the user to later search, navigate, or build upon the work embodied by this network. Article URL: ftp://ftp.cs.umd.edu/pub/hcil/Reports-Abstracts-Bibliography/2005-10html/2005-10.htm Read 62 more articles from University Of Maryland sorted by date, popularity, or title. Next Article: Patterns of Media Use in an Activity-Centric Collaborative Environment     This site is a labour of love built by Chris McEvoy