Just before we go on holidays, I received the news that our long paper has been accepted for the OZchi'06 conference in Sydney! It is titled "An information overload study: Using design methods for understanding". It is based on the work on information overload in which I participated with my former employer (before we left for France). So I'm happy my ex-colleagues picked it up and wrote a paper about all our work, of which I'm now third author. I was so busy before we left that I didn't have time to write a paper. And now here it is! Here is the abstract:
Information overload is not a clear-cut concept. We deliberately took this conceptual ambiguity as starting point in our study on information overload of knowledge workers in their organizational context. We used several methods including critical incidents collection, cultural probing and storytelling. These methods are increasingly used to inspire designers in designing technology solutions. However, for understanding ambiguous concepts they are less common. With this study we aim to bridge the gap between understanding human behaviour and (technological) support. Moreover, we select these design methods as in this way respondents contribute optimally to the articulation of the problem of information overload. This awareness and insight in information overload not only help respondents understand why they perceive information overload as problematic, it also inform us to come up with practical solutions that are valuable to the knowledge workers to deal with information overload.
I think my former colleagues are fighting now who will go to Sydney in November. If you are there, you can see who won.
Now I'm going to pack. Back in >2 weeks (not too tired of all the col climbing I hope).