Engaging In Information Interaction

People interact with information in a myriad of ways [1]. As well as actively seeking information, people also encounter it, and there have been various efforts to design systems that support encountering and keeping track of encountered information [2,3]. But what people engage with depends: on how it fits with their ongoing activities as well as whether they recognize its potential value [4]. Sometimes, people are open to engaging with information, and may experience information encountering as serendipitous; at other times, a similar encounter might feel like overload or distraction [5]. The design of systems that support effective engagement will ideally take account of people's practices and contexts as well as their interests. Perhaps paradoxically, serendipitous encounters rarely happen by chance: people invest in various ways in increasing the likelihood of valuable information encounters that enable them to keep up-to-date and make creative leaps [6,7]; again, good design can facilitate productive interactions with information [8]. In this talk, I will discuss various qualitative studies of how people fit information encountering into their lives, how they experience serendipity, and some of the ways they invest up-front effort in future information interactions; I will also highlight opportunities to design to support people in making best use of information they find.