Maeda's SIMPLICITY

Paper: Going, Going, Gone?

I renewed my athletic card and locker at MIT's new state-of-the-art athletic facilities today like I do every year in the month of January. They say that health clubs make their biggest profit in January due to the high volume of people that sign up as part of their New Year's resolution to get more fit. The fact that I renew every year in January must tell you something ... (this is one of those MENSA puzzlers).

When I had finished my transaction, the cordial and professional athletic facilities person at the desk gave me my paperwork. I asked one last question about some kind of health insurance rebate I had qualified for, to which he gave me the pertinent information. I smiled and was all set to go when he made an odd face to me and said, "I've got to ask you a question. Will paper-based advertising go away?" My eyebrows raised. That's an awfully tough question to throw at someone at an unexpected moment. Ah the joy of MIT! You never know where or when or by whom you are going to get quizzed.

My response was, "No. I expect paper-based advertising will always be around." As I walked away from him to get my towel I then became concerned thinking, "If they don't print things on paper in the future, would I one day open a fortune cookie and out would pop some sort of mini-Palm Pilot with my fortune on it?" The next question that came to mind was, "How will they bake the cookie without melting the Palm device?"

I later checked with my research group. Burak Arikan expressed the opinion most clearly with, "As long as paper is made, it will be printed upon for advertising. If paper were to go away, then there would be no more." It's hard to argue with that logic.

Before the snowflake-a-thon we had three special presentations on the theme of paper. The first was by our blogger-celebrity Mike Lee from AARP on his work on websites rendered in the medium of origamic paper constructions. Mike translated a website's hierarchical structures into a variety of elegant foldable forms that drew oooooh's and aaaaaah's. Then digital publishing wizard Peter Meirs from Time presented a 12-minute film entitled, "The World of Paper" in a Michael Moore mockumentary fashion where he interviewed experts on paper within Time. One note that I found particularly interesting was how by working with paper companies, Time was able to utilize a specially formulated paper that reduced the total amount of weight of magazines that Time shipped each year. Yearly savings amounted to millions of dollars by getting past the production cost issues of the content in the magazine, and going directly into the medium of paper itself. Finally Joe Jacobson of the Media Lab presented recent advances in the world of printable electronic ink where we got to see thin electronic displays that could be cut (and still work), rolled (and still work), and also crumpled (and still work). Joe's work on the ink, versus the paper, is an important idea.

Reflecting on this new knowledge, and my head buzzing with the question from the fellow at the athletic center, I now do expect paper, as we know it, to go away. But we can look forward to paper, as we will know it, in this new century.