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Preface
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Preface Life is complex. Every activity a person undertakes, whether physical or mental, is governed by rules, conventions, traditions, social position, personal preferences, the specific situation in which the activity takes place, and other constraints. Moreover , these factors interact with one another. While this complexity adds color to our lives, it confounds scholars’ pursuit to understand human life. Clearly, researchers cannot identify and analyze all possible conditions under which an activity takes place and the effects of the various factors on the activity. As a result, much of human sciences’ research tries to overlook complexity in order to make objects of study “researchable.” However, one of the leading threads in this book is the conviction that complexity cannot be overlooked if researchers wish to achieve a holistic understanding of humans, particularly if they hope to bring about changes that will improve the quality of human lives. Human information interaction (HII)—the area of study that investigates how humans interact with information—is no exception. The design of systems and services to support HII requires an understanding of human interaction in all its complexity. While this understanding is difficult enough to achieve, another major challenge emerges from the difficulties inherent in the translation of real-life and unstructured HII complexity into formal, linear structures necessary for systems design. While such translation is possible, it is a complex process in itself. This book presents cognitive work analysis as an approach that addresses this challenge. Rather than avoiding complexity, this approach embraces it and, at the same time, provides a conceptual framework and tools to harness it to create design requirements. Cognitive work analysis is an ecological approach to design—one that analyzes the forces in the environment that shape human interaction with information. x Preface The Motivation for the Book This book is based on my research experience in the area of human information behavior (HIB) during the last three decades. HIB emerged as an established area in the field of library and information science about 40 years ago and has focused mainly on studying the behavior of people as they search for information. HIB is now joining other relatively new areas such as human-computer interaction, human factors, information retrieval, and social informatics; together, they make up the field of human information interaction. HII focuses on the interaction between humans and information with the support of any type of technology, be it face-to-face communication, paper, or advanced technology. My research has been stimulated by the aspiration to create changes that would improve the quality of life. Although I enjoy abstract conversations and philosophizing , I have been attracted to approaches that are relevant to practice from the beginning of my research path. Throughout my research work, I have been engaged in qualitative field studies—often with collaborators—to investigate the information behavior of various groups of people. My study participants included librarians searching online bibliographic databases on behalf of users; engineers looking for information in various modes, including collaborative information retrieval; high school students searching the web to complete homework assignments; and sanitation workers using mobile technology in the field. Most of these studies contributed new insights and generated requirements for the design of information systems that could support the work of these groups. The various alternatives and options that I have considered and the conclusions I have drawn from this research experience have increased my confidence in the value of the ecological approach. I recognized that this approach is valuable not only to the study of human information behavior but also to the study of human information interaction in general. The most obvious application of the ecological approach to an HIB study—and the approach that guided my research—is to grant a central role to the context in which information behavior takes place and to the way it shapes behavior. This view is rare in mainstream HIB research. While studies of the information behavior of specific groups of people in distinct contexts have become common since the late 1990s, they have almost never systematically investigated the contexts themselves and have seldom uncovered relationships between behavior and context. This book is a critical analysis of HIB research from an ecological perspective with the goal of demonstrating how cognitive work analysis can increase the [3.237.186.170] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 00:00 GMT) Preface xi contribution of HIB studies to practice, and in particular, to the design of information systems. My Philosophical Stance My research has also...