Cognitive Artifacts in Complex Work - Ambient Intelligence for Scientific Discovery - page 180

The life sciences study shows how information practice in research has be-
come routine and habituated. We describe an information ecology with highly
stable tasks, and a preference trend among life scientists converging on only
two search tools, PubMed for scientific publications and Google for everything
outside of the literature. After nearly 10 years of online scientific publishing,
the printed research article remains the end product of successful searching, and
very little online reading or use of electronic article formats was found across
multiple labs. And the process of collecting the complete set of research arti-
cles continues to demand extensive time, even in the online information ecology,
given the uneven distribution of available online articles. The substantive finding
is that scientists prefer using the printed artifact, and most important articles
are printed and maintained as hard copy. Several conclusions about cognitive
artifacts in discovery follow from these findings.
Information and Memory Are Maintained by Cognitive Artifacts. In
complex, collaborative work domains as described in the case studies, cognitive
artifacts provide a means of distributing information and maintaining collabo-
rative memory.
Physical Cognitive Artifacts Reveal the Boundaries of Information
Technology. In complex, high risk or high uncertainty settings, workers create
or appropriate endogenous artifacts to guide knowledge practices such as plan-
ning and discovery, and to supplement collaboration. These cognitive artifacts
represent boundary conditions that may not be readily replaced by information
technology. Their success lies in how well they reflect cognitive work in their
particular setting.
Tangible Artifacts Are Key Markers for Design. Physical artifacts that
are used in cognitive work in high-uncertainty domains offer a way to support
the underlying cognitive requirements of the cognitive work. In life sciences,
the highly-stable use of simple online search resources and preference for printed
articles reveals the continuing primacy of the printed article format. The printed
article has maintained its role as a primary cognitive artifact because of its
affordance for reading and portability, and the shared practices that have evolved
with its use over many years. Electronic versions of the same article exhibit few
of the physical affordances. To support effective distributed use of information
artifacts, a new electronic model of the information object should be designed
that provides specific information at the level of detail required for use, and
provides another channel for accessing the full artifact.
People Work Through Information Artifacts, but Attend to Objects.
Information artifacts (e.g., research articles) are carriers of information objects,
and participants locate and share these objects when using information. Discov-
ery processes should identify and represent information objects from the mul-
tiple sources of artifacts in the information ecology. Systems designed to aid
distributed discovery practices must account for the situated relevance of infor-
mation objects as they are actually used in practice.