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<\/p>\nIf you ever attend Milan\u2019s Design Week\u2014a sweeping furniture fair, art festival, and Prosecco-soaked party that takes over Italy\u2019s financial capital each April\u2014you will need several essentials to fit in with the global trendsetters in attendance.<\/p>\n
First, your glasses. This is a design crowd, so the options are polarized into two camps: ultraminimal frameless spheres that hover over your face, and inch-thick acetate beasts. Next, your clothes. Leave ankle-snapping heels and impossible dresses to the fools at Fashion Week; the name of the game here is the ideal mix of form with function, such as a limited-edition pair of Converse clad in sharkskin. Also scarves. You can never wear too big a scarf at Design Week, even if a sudden heat wave descends on the city.<\/p>\n
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Finally, there\u2019s your kit. If you carry a bag, it needs to be small, streamlined, and slung over the shoulder. In one hand, firmly grasp the latest iPhone, which you\u2019ll use to take photos of new chairs and kitchen tile installations, stay in touch with colleagues, and navigate your way between parties and events all over Milan.<\/p>\n
In the other hand, you will carry a black Moleskine notebook. Perhaps you will bring the same, lovingly worn Moleskine back to Milan year after year, or maybe you will unwrap a fresh one at the start of every Design Week. You will jot quick notes and sketches in it as you tour showrooms and exhibits, and at the end of each long day, you will open it on a caf\u00e9 table, order a cold Peroni and a plate of mortadella, put pen to paper, and digest all the exhibits, products, and far-reaching designs you\u2019ve seen since the morning. You might start by writing lists of words, maybe descriptive adjectives, or a few lines of insights that tease out this notion you have forming about the organic desire for analog experiences in a hyper-digitized age.<\/p>\n
After a page or two, you\u2019ll stop, take a sip of your beer, and look around. You\u2019ll draw inspiration from the pale gold of the beer, the beautifully irregular spots of the mortadella, the bleached ceramic plate it sits on . . . and suddenly you\u2019ll be designing your own textile line, filling pages almost as fast as you can turn them, with sketches and words and feverishly added details.<\/p>\n Yes, I am being romantic, and perhaps mortadella isn\u2019t a traditional muse. But this is exactly what I saw at the end of each day during my visit to Milan in the middle of Design Week. Moleskines . . . hundreds of them, thick with the ideas being written and sketched in them by the most talented and driven design minds in the world. Old designers, young designers, European designers, and Asian and Latin-American designers\u2014the Moleskine notebook is their common tool. You certainly do not need to visit Milan to witness this. Just step into any coffee shop, pretty much anywhere in the world, and you will find Moleskine notebooks resting on tables next to lattes and laptops. With their rounded corners, elastic closure, and ivory paper, they are instantly recognizable. Which is why I see them everywhere: in the hands of teachers, on my doctor\u2019s desk, in the bags of computer software programmers.<\/p>\n I am fascinated by Moleskine for several reasons. Paper was the first analog technology to be seriously challenged by digital. Even before the rise of the personal computer, the term paperless office had emerged as an obsession of the business world by the late 1970s. The promise of a computer reducing the cost, labor, and space associated with printing, storing, and organizing so much physical information was powerful. Office workers were called \u201cpaper pushers\u201d for a reason, and less time pushing paper meant more time, and money, devoted to other work. Although the fully paperless office has yet to come to fruition, certain paper artifacts are now largely digital. E-mail, texts, and PDFs have taken the place of memos, telegrams, and faxes. When I entered university in 1998, I was one of the few students to take class notes on a miniature laptop. Today, screens overlook college lecture halls. Paper hasn\u2019t disappeared, but it is no longer dominant.<\/p>\n Paper is also the oldest analog technology to be seriously challenged by digital. Vinyl records had been around less than forty years when the CD came out, but paper has existed, in one form or another, for thousands of years. It is the backbone of the economic, cultural, scientific, and spiritual core we call civilization. Even the bound notebook, the core technology behind Moleskine\u2019s main product, predates European settlement of the Americas. Our relationship to paper is older, deeper, and more varied than any other analog technology out there. Understanding where paper\u2019s advantages lie, where it has struggled to compete with digital technology, and where it has crafted a new sense of identity is key to understanding how the Revenge of Analog is playing itself out.<\/p>\n The revenge of paper shows that analog technology can excel at specific tasks and uses on a very practical level, especially when compared to digital technology. While paper use may have shrunk in certain areas since the introduction of digital communications, in other uses and purposes, paper\u2019s emotional, functional, and economic value has increased. Paper may be used less, but where it is growing, paper is worth more.<\/p>\n\t\t![\"\"](\"https:\/\/fullfocus.co\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/milan.jpg\")
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<\/a>Nearly everyone I interviewed for my book, The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter<\/em><\/a>, pulled out a Moleskine notebook at some point, or had one sitting nearby. For a thoroughly analog object, the Moleskine is one of the iconic tools of our digitally-focused century.<\/p>\nWhere paper is growing<\/h3>\n