Cognitive Artifacts in Complex Work - Ambient Intelligence for Scientific Discovery - page 171

persistent form of a manuscript draft or lab notebook. But unimportant articles
are often screened and not even printed or read. The selection and distribution of
specific printed articles mediates group awareness of current research issues, pub-
lishing trends, competition, quality standards, and of course, emerging findings
and applicable facts. Such purposes and uses of paper documents in collaborative
knowledge work have been recently validated [31].
The article is maintained as a printed artifact, and as a persistent personal ar-
tifact. But these artifacts were explicitly distributed among other lab members.
Scientists indicated they commonly shared newsworthy articles or those rele-
vant to research projects by photocopying and distributing them to the desks of
intended readers. While we might expect frequent distribution of PDF articles
as email attachments, graduate students in two different cases explained it was
“just as easy” to copy the article, and this practice was observed during the field
visit.
It appears another reason for personally distributing a hard copy article was
the meaning attributed to the act of this distribution. One graduate student
admitted they preferred to photocopy the printed article because it was “more
likely to be read” than if sent via email. The recipients were aware of the spe-
cific individual responsible for the distribution. There follows the expectation
of reading the article and its contribution to distributed memory, now available
for future research (discovery-oriented) discussions in referring to these articles.
But the printed article as artifact also carries meanings in its very format, and
may be considered a more direct expression of the intent of the research. People
annotate the articles and note key paragraphs. When copying articles to senior
investigators, graduate students often highlighted or annotated within the arti-
cle, managing the memory load of intended recipients. These annotations refer
to components we consider informationobjects,whichsignalanintentionor
literally, an “objective.”

4.7 Laboratory Notebook as Cognitive Artifact

In all lab locations in both field study locations, life sciences researchers main-
tained traditional bound laboratory notebooks to record experiments. The
printed lab notebook is required as both a personal record of experiments for a
project, and a legal document representing findings to establish original discov-
ery or to file for patents. These are compelling reasons to maintain the paper
notebook artifact, but interest in electronic notebooks has grown. Although elec-
tronic lab notebooks have been identified as an emerging technology at the lab
bench, they have yet to reach significant adoption. Field evaluations of early
prototypes have only started to gain some interest among chemists and other
scientists [30], but many issues of form factor, user interface, and data manage-
ment remain to be established.
Scientists keep the lab notebook as a document of record for every experiment
conducted. Notebooks are portable, and often reviewed by the supervisors and
other research project members in discussions of findings and procedure. In some
molecular biology labs, scientists set up and run one experiment a day, following