Putting paper back in the office

MAKE IT FUN: To entice employees to write by hand, work the “hot newness” angle. “I buy notebooks and give them to employees whenever I can,” says cofounder Pasquale D’Silva of Keezy, a music app developer. Working on paper makes his employees “more focused,” he says. “If you try to do all the problem-solving at a computer, you can become precious about your ideas. If you draw on paper, you have this low-fi prototype. On paper, anything goes.” D’Silva finds that employees’ paper-based ideas frequently “end up being more thoughtful” than those built on a computer.

TAKE BABY STEPS: Zach Sims cofounded Codecademy to teach digital skills, but he’s been encouraging his team to use paper more often because he feels that technology can be distracting. Sims urges employees to use paper instead of laptops in meetings. If someone opens a laptop, he asks the person to explain why. The result has been shorter meetings, because “paper forces you to be present with the people in the room and your thoughts,” he says. “When people aren’t messing around, they’re more engaged and finish faster.”

BE PATIENT: Gadi Amit, principal designer and owner of New Deal Design, the San Francisco firm that helped design Fitbit, warns that getting some employees to embrace paper can take persistence. “Young designers are being trained to believe in the supremacy of computers,” he says. He urges his employees to work on paper at least once a day. He says the messiness of writing and drawing by hand forces designers to break away from preconceptions. Once, when employees were sketching ideas for a wearable health device, Amit says he noticed a doodle in the corner of a sketch page. That doodle ended up as the basis for the winning concept.