Cognitive Artifacts in Complex Work - Ambient Intelligence for Scientific Discovery - page 162

only a restricted “keyhole” view of the day prevent practitioners from making
connections that are a necessary part of their cognitive work.
Clear. Unambiguous and free from confusion. Procedures must be completely
and precisely described in order to specify what is to be done. Minor differences
in wording result in major differences in the kind of supplies and equipment
that will be required for a procedure. The paper artifact contained complete
descriptions of each procedure to be performed. The computer-based display only
allows truncated descriptions, which create misleading procedure descriptions
that have caused departments to plan for the wrong procedure.
Malleable. Able to be manipulated by those who use them. Practitioners interact
with many artifacts frequently as they obtain and provide information among
the team. They also use artifacts in a variety of subtle ways, depending on their
confidence in the information they have. Nursing and anesthesia coordinators
were able to write notes on the paper artifact to track pertinent information. The
structure of artifacts can also be changed. For example, the team can modify the
OR board layout to better support cognitive work as it evolves. The computer-
based display does not allow for this kind of interaction.
4 Cognitive Work in the Laboratory:
Life Sciences Research
In 2002-2003 a phased field study [15] investigated information behaviors in life
sciences research at two North American universities, at a molecular biology
research center and a large pharmacology department. Information behaviors
are the everyday repeatable search, review, exchange, and other uses of scientific
information drawn from print and electronic resources. The study focused on
understanding the actual information behavior of life scientists in their daily
work practice in research projects, which have discovery and publication as goals.
A cognitive ethnography examined information practices and cognitive arti-
facts within collaborative research projects. An activity theory framework was
adopted to model and understand distributed cognitive work as revealed in infor-
mation practices. The study investigated cognitive drivers within experimental
research that trigger selection and use of information resources. A major purpose
of this exploratory study was to identify opportunities for improving information
services design, as well as to understand information behavior.
Two observations of information activity in research motivate analysis of
cognitive artifacts in discovery. One, after nearly a decade of having electronic
research articles available online, scientists constantly print important articles
and generally ignore electronic (PDF and HTML) versions. The electronic file
is convenient for scanning and review, but serious reading is done from the
printed article. Even with the very limited bench space available for information
work, scientists print and stack (or bind) selected articles. Two, nearly all these
researchers used only one search engine for retrieval of research articles, either