It’s not often that you get a human interest story out of a big technology shindig like HP’s Global Influencer Summit, which is why this particular breakout session was such a pleasant surprise. Hewlett-Packard apparently wasn’t quite sure that the whole “print is dead” thing is actually happening, so they set out to test the saying in a manner that would make the Mythbusters proud.

Teaming up with photographer Chase Jarvis, they removed printed material from the small American town of Spring Green for seven days. Now, they couldn’t remove all the printed material, because of road traffic signs being necessary for little things like preventing accidents; but everything else was fair game. Supermarkets were stripped of their printed packaging, menus disappeared from diners and a little participating wine store ended up shocking their unprepared customers with all the bottles hidden in unmarked paperbags.

Now, they defined print very, very broadly here; but the point was made and the result of this was a lot of disoriented citizens who couldn’t quite grasp the concept of no print. While they eventually did compensate for the missing print with hand-written everything, it did go to show just how important printed materials are to our daily lives.

There was also documentary made on the experiment titled 7 Days Without Print and will be premiering 14 June. Alongside this thought provoking case study, HP also ran another study about the role of print in some other communities. This time across America, India and Singapore. The white paper for that study is on the way, so watch this space for more updates.