This third issue of Back Office is devoted to various experiences of reading on screens. Over the course of the last decades, this change has introduced deep shifts whose effects are still being assessed. Following the possible end of linear writing, predicted by the “communicologist” Vilém Flusser as early as the 1970s, the philosopher Jacques Derrida reflected on the “end of paper” as the primary medium for inscription. The proliferation of screens and the dawn of the internet paved the way for expression forms falling under the category of an enlarged “graphosphere”, presumably still dominated by the norms and figures of paper (ligns, the sheet, the page, paragraphs, margins, etc.). Could the task of the designer be to accompany, as smoothly as possible, this transition from one technical era to the next, or could it be, on the contrary, to postpone the passage from paper to screen?

With contribution by: Alexia de Visscher, Chloé Delaume, Dan Rubin, Étienne Mineur, Johanna Drucker, Lucile Haute, Nathan Jones, Nicolas Tilly, Sam Skinner, Vilém Flusser and Yves Citton