Variations foraging

Information seeking is hard and can become harder in the presence of several, very similar variants of the same artifact, as is common in several exploratory creative tasks. Literature has largely overlooked how people forage among multiple variants of an artifact, thereby leading to variations-support tools based solely on empirical observations and not based on a theory. To fill in this gap, my research will apply the foundations of Information Foraging Theory (IFT) to investigate how people forage for information in the presence of variants. My research will be the first to apply IFT to situations involving variants.

Major Advisor: Margaret Burnett
Committee: Anita Sarma
Committee: Cindy Grimm
Committee: Eric Walkingshaw
GCR: David Kling