The Filing Cabinet

Granular Certainty, the Vertical Filing Cabinet, and the Transformation of Files

Craig Robertson

Anthropomorphizing paper acknowledges the anxiety associated with misplacing loose paper. Circulating through the office, papers were expected to manifest the valuable attributes of information as a discrete unit but not to become disconnected from the ov... See more

Unlike the brain, the file cabinet approach makes it difficult or impossible to remix or reuse the same piece of information. Each time a change is made to any given file, it has to be tracked down and updated in every location in which it exists. This leads to redundancy, with a cluttering of near-identical ideas, and significant work any time a s

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we’re going to look back at how we designed the world around computers with the same regret that we look at how we’ve designed cities around cars

Even as the personal computer and then the phone made it onto the desktop and into the hands of most every single employee regardless of job, the structure, organization, and processes of a company continued to mirror those of the 20th century.