ASSESSING RELEVANCE: DESIGNERS' PERCEPTION OF INFORMATION USEFULNESS
DS 36: Proceedings DESIGN 2006, the 9th International Design Conference, Dubrovnik, Croatia
Year: 2006
Editor: Marjanovic, D.
Author: Restrepo, J.
Section: COMPETENCIES & COMMUNICATIONS
Page(s): 1235-1242
Abstract
The paper studies relevance as perceived by designers when interacting with information systems. It proposes that relevance judgments depend on the designers’ previous knowledge and understanding of the situation, on the particular information needs and change as they progress on the information seeking process. An empirical study shows how these relevance criteria are used in the assessement of information usefulness. The results show that whilst the perceived relevance of documents change, only some of the criteria used in the assessement does. They also suggest that the information the designers accessed was used more as a means to underpin decisions or to back up their own knowledge rather than to learn new things.
Keywords: relevance, knowledge management, engineering design