The Information Science Breakfast Series is a seminar-style meeting held one morning a week. The Series provides a venue to share, discover, and discuss research happening in Information Science. It is intended to be a less formal environment; and practice talks, works in progress, and elicitations for feedback on early-stage ideas are all welcome forms of presentation. This week's speakers will be Maria Hakansson, a postdoc in Information Science, and Nitesh Goyal, a PhD student in Information Science, who will be delivering CHI practice talks. Further details are below.

 

Maria Hakansson

Title: Beyond Being Green: Simple Living Families and ICT

Abstract: Motivated by a need in sustainable HCI for studies of everyday practices, and a belief that a holistic view on sustain- ability is crucial to deeper understanding of how to design ICT to support sustainability, we here present a qualitative study of 11 simple living families in the US. Simple living refers to a lifestyle which is voluntarily simple out of concern for both the environment and quality of life. Our goal was to learn about a holistic view on sustainability and the role of ICT in helping and hindering families to live simply. The study contributes new insights about how holistic sustainability could be a valuable lens for HCI, revealing that sustainability is important to a wider range of areas in HCI than previously discussed. We conclude with implications for HCI for how to support sustainable practices beyond being “about” being green.

 

Nitesh Goyal

Title: Effects of Visualization and Note-Taking on Sensemaking and Analysis

Abstract: Many sophisticated tools have been developed to help analysts detect patterns in large datasets, but the value of these tools’ individual features is rarely tested. In an experiment in which participants played detectives solving homicides, we tested the utility of a visualization of data links and a notepad for collecting and organizing annotations. The vis- ualization significantly improved participants’ ability to solve the crime whereas the notepad did not. Having both features available provided no benefit over having just the visualization. The results inform strategies for evaluating intelligence analysis tools.