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Xerox’s Erasable Paper Project
John Eastman, Black and White, January 17, 2007
From the article [excerpted interview questions and answers about PARC]:
In November of 2006, Xerox Corporation announced the development of a technology that they call “erasable paper.” A year later, as laboratory milestones continue to be met by Xerox, John Eastman interviewed Manager of Xerox Canada’s New Materials Design and Synthesis Lab Dr. Paul Smith and Manager of Corporate Public Relations Bill McKee.
The research effort that is being conducted is a collaborative effort.
SMITH: Yes. That’s correct. It’s a collaborative effort with Palo Alto Research Center, PARC and the Xerox Research Centre in Canada. There is a reason for that. The Xerox Research Centre of Canada is fully responsible for all of Xerox’s materials research, which is why the media, the paper, was actually developed here, and then Palo Alto, which obviously is very renowned for development of the Ethernet and GUI [Graphical User Interface] and personal computing, is where the actual printer was developed.
Do the [Xerox] research centers often collaborate with each other?
SMITH: ...So we collaborate very strongly with the Xerox Research Center in Webster, and very strongly with PARC, because they have different expertise that we require to be able to develop a product.
So the idea for this product came out of a study in Palo Alto?
SMITH: Actually yes. That’s right. It came out of a study that was looking at work practices. At Xerox in general we look at work practices especially when it relates to document technology. That can be anything from reading electronic documents, which can help people use and file and view electronic documents. …if you just could fade it overnight, people would reuse it the next day.But obviously the hard copy documents are also extremely important. And so, in Palo Alto, they began to look at work-studies of how people use their documents in the office and that was where we really began to realize that actually people don’t keep what they print for very long. In fact, not very long at all, probably just a day. But that was really where it came from. We suddenly realized that the number of pages printed in the office is increasing dramatically, but people are only using them for an hour or a day before they throw them away. Sometimes even if you need it the next day, we found that if you needed that printed document the next day, we did find that people won’t necessarily keep it. They throw it away and then reprint it the next day, because electronically you could find it again. And so, that was where it came from. People love printing. I think people love taking their printed page to the meeting with them.
So they like printing it but they don’t keep it. And that’s really where this project started to come from. So actually, someone was looking at what people throw away at the end of the day. They looked at the recycle bins. They decided whether they recycled prints that were black and white or color. They classified them into calendars or emails or whatever they were. So they could really see where the target market was.
What—was this the study conducted by the anthropologist, Brinda Dalal?
SMITH: Brinda, that’s right. Brinda Dalal, that’s right. She worked with the area manager , Eric Schrader.
Is she still involved in the project today?
SMITH: Yes. Absolutely and Eric is the lead in Palo Alto.
I have another question in regard to Brinda Dalal. Did Xerox initiate the idea for that study?
SMITH: Yes. That was from Palo Alto. That’s right. We did initiate that for this project. We looked at people’s work habits, generally actually, to see how they used documents. So yes, this one was specifically focused on the hard copy output.
I’d like to talk for just for a minute again about the collaboration between you and Palo Alto. Is this a collaboration that involves meeting in person? Is this primarily done through email, Internet communications? What’s the primary… ?
SMITH: Yes. Computer and virtual actually. Communicating on projects has changed a lot. I think that there is always a place for face to face. It’s always important. We do get together sometimes, either here or in Palo Alto. But we can’t meet to interact on a very regular basis, and so, just like all the other teams in Xerox, we are really electronically enabled. We use all types of conferencing. We even have the ability to videoconference. I would say most of the time, we use ’NetMeeting’, where both teams physically see the slide, and we can talk. And we talk every single week with Palo Alto, on a regular basis, on a set meeting structure. So we use ’NetMeeting’-type technologies really extensively.
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