As tax season feverishly comes to a close, it seems a fitting moment to consider a realm of design work that hardly gets any attention. Not the dull gray administrative documents like tax forms and instructions. Not websites like IRS.gov. Not tax preparation software like TurboTax.

I’m talking about receipts. More generally, I mean all those little in-between design artifacts like tickets, stubs, and claim checks that serve boring but necessary functions of everyday life — counting, recording, verifying, identifying, authorizing — but sit squarely in design’s blind spot.

I do an awful lot of squirrel-like receipt stashing, but it’s not until tax time, when I have to sort through each one forensically to account for every little expense, that I start to realize how little design actually goes into these small, flimsy but widely diverse paper squares. Ages ago, bills of sale and other transactional documents were handwritten, or preprinted with lines and recurring information so that only new data need be entered. There was a charm to them, the human touch of penmanship framed within a mechanical imprint. These days, most receipts are entirely machine printed in blocky low-res fonts on wispy thermal paper. Can’t forget the legal fine print or sincerely heartfelt “HAVE A NICE DAY” or “THANK YOU FOR YOUR BUSINESS.” And, opportunistically, some supermarkets take advantage of the empty real estate on the back of a receipt and slap on some ads and coupons.

How could designers let this anti-design go on for so long?

Aside from expense accounting, receipts allow for returns, exchanges, and refunds, but have afforded little else (notably, Pret A Manger prints the wifi password and bathroom keycode on their receipts to “reward” patrons). The same goes for used transit tickets, museum admission stubs, parking tickets, boarding passes, and all the other commercial ephemera we accumulate almost every time we spend money. There’s a chance they might get used as bookmarks or impromptu note paper, maybe even serve as a souvenir of a special event, but most of the time, they get absent-mindedly stuffed into pockets or crumpled and tossed away. Soon enough, though, with the rise of e-mail receipts and device-based transactions, all those scraps of paper will be no more.

So should we just wait for this annoying single-use detritus to get phased out and happily welcome our paperless future? Or is there an opportunity to reconsider the role of this clerical confetti?

One way to think about this particular design challenge is to situate these artifacts in a broader context of use and to revise the notion of design work as primarily conventional grand gestures. For instance, if a transit system takes such great care to design their identity, wayfinding and signage, online information systems, advertising, marketing, all the way to their employees’ uniforms, why do they cut corners or care less about other, more mundane but ubiquitous touchpoints like their ticketing systems and the design of tickets and receipts? Is it assumed that the investment won’t pay off because tickets are low cost and disposable (because that’s what other similar companies are doing)? Or has it never occurred to them that they could completely reimagine tickets and receipts to enhance or extend their usefulness and value, not to mention minimize waste? What do customers think?

It doesn’t take much “out of the box” thinking to open doors of design exploration:

• AMUSEMENT: What if there was a random fortune printed on the bottom, like you’d find in a fortune cookie?
• ART: What if you could collect different receipts with art printed on the back, then assemble them to make interesting collages?
• RECREATION: What if the receipt contained a game like sudoku or a picture to be colored in?
• INFORMATION: What if you could see a personal dashboard of your spending habits or purchases or recommendations drawn from your past transactions? Or what if your local coffee shop printed out headline news and weather on your morning coffee receipt?
• ENVIRONMENT: What if the paper had seeds in it, so you could plant it and grow a garden?
• GAMING/CONTESTS: What if there was a puzzle or series of clues over time that customers would have to piece together and solve in order to win something?

The list could go on (some of it is borrowed from Berg’s Little Printer). The point is that there’s a world of possibility right now to do more with these little pieces of paper — to actually reinforce and improve the experience a customer, passenger, or citizen has with a company or organization.

Designers shouldn’t limit their capabilities to the standard-issue items they’re hired to design for, like the physical environment, the look and feel of a product or service, the face-to-face staff encounters, the online/mobile interactions, and the marketing, advertising, and information design artifacts. Nor should they limit their thinking to familiar patterns and cling to assumptions about what can and can’t be done — and especially what is and isn’t worth their attention. Outside of the spotlight of typical design moments is a lot of overlooked but necessary “in-between” design: forms, instructions, and documents that serve as connective tissue linking touch points; tickets, stubs, and receipts that punctuate the start and end of key activities; labels, stickers, and tags that make systems visible.

Good design is about the big things, the little things, and even the seemingly insignificant things that end up in our coat pockets. All of those things form a complete picture of our designed lives.