I unashamedly borrow the core of this piece from an article in The Economist, written some twenty years ago before we all really understood how computers would completely change the way we interact with information. It's been in a notice pinned on my office wall for most of those twenty years, and It's time I shared the secret with anyone who has a sense of guilt about living in a mess.
A messy desk is not necessarily a bad thing. For one, it
provides context that aids memory in locating a missing document or
scrap of paper. An ergonomist has gone a step further by devising a
computerised database to work out a filing system for messy desks.
Most people can be divided Into the obsessively tidy and the
madly messy. Likewise. some rooms will be paragons of neatness — desks cleared,
papers filed, books shelved — whereas others look as though their contents have
been spewed out in a massive eruption.
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| Albert was famously untidy |
The tidy-minded (anal) often accuse the slovenly (creative) of being
disorganised in spirit as well as appearance. They are wrong. Though a messy
desk is not ideal, it has features which can make it a cheap, flexible and
relatively efficient filing system — features which, until now. have been
remarkably resistant to computerisation.
Dr [Now Professor] Mark Lansdale, an ergonomist at Loughborough
University. aims to change that. Using the way that people think and
remember things, rather than the ways that efficiency experts believe they
ought to: he is devising a computerised database which will deliver the
advantages of the messy desk, without the mess.
The question always asked by people with messy desks is,
when you tidy up. where do you put everything so that you can find them again?
It Is a good question. Manual filing is a rigid process. A piece of paper can
go in under only a single heading. Fine if only one heading is appropriate, but
if there Is ambiguity, forget It. Which is just what people do.
In some cases, four out of five such categorisations are
forgotten overnight. And If the information is burled invisibly in a computer
database, rather than being a piece of paper which can be found by a physical
search, the situation is still worse.
This is because most people remember things not by
mentally pigeonholing them, but reconstructing circumstances around them until
they gradually track them down. This is where the messy desk comes in.
Messy desks give the sort of context that aids memory.
The papers are visible (or, at least, partly so), so that things about them can
be recognised. Their position bears some relation to when they arrived, or were
last referred to. And it is likely that the normal process of working will have
caused papers that relate to each other to have ended up together.
These clues enable the owner of the desk to work out
where the target is, even if this Is unknown to start with. Lansdale refers to this as the "volcano" model
of filing: a more or less clear area in the middle of the desk — the bit where the
work is done— is a crater in a vaguely conical heap of paperwork.
The farther a paper is from the crater, the less
immediately relevant It is. Eventually, the most useless papers will fall to
the floor and be swept away by the cleaners.
His computerised replacement is called MEMOIRS It can
handle both' electronic "documents" and real ones — the latter are
recorded by a video camera so that they can be displayed on screen. The arrival
of a document is an "event".
So is any subsequent handling of it. Just as they would
be to a perfect human memory, all of these events can be recalled. In
combination, they will define not only a document, but a particular stage of
its passage through the electronic office — for, unlike a conventional
database, MEMOIRS does not delete or rewrite the past.
Sadly it seems Memoirs was never actually created as a product, and in the 20 years since the original work, much has changed about the way we interact with computers and database and now information clouds. But the general principle that those blessed with sophisticated minds tend to live in a more dishevelled circumstances suits me just fine.
