Abstract Information is powerful; it can influence peoples' views and, in turn, their behavior. Much recent research and discussion on the role information plays in view change has focused on filter bubbles, echo chambers and misinformation and how they might influence what people think and how they act. However, no prior work has focused specifically on understanding the human information behavior (HIB) that drives and facilitates view change. We report findings from interviews with 18 people who recently changed views on issues they considered important. We found a tight symbiotic relationship between HIB and view change; passive information encountering sparked change, often spurring follow‐up active seeking and verification which progressed the change to a “point of no return,” supported making the change and reinforced the decision to change. When shared, information that contributed to the change sometimes sparked changes in others (as did expressing or debating the change), serving as an information encounter that perpetuated a cycle of HIB and view change. This understanding of the integral role of HIB in view change can inform policy and systems design to promote view change autonomy and a broader research agenda of understanding HIB to support democratic principles and values.

It is a ‘truth universally acknowledged’ that people prefer to minimize encounters with information they disagree with and ignore it where they find it. Algorithms purportedly support this avoidance by creating filter bubbles filled only with agreeable information potentially increasing polarisation and undermining democracy. How accurate is this portrayal, though? Recent research has begun to cast doubt. We challenge these assumptions and report a two-phase analysis of filter bubble-bursting behavior. The first phase reports novel incidental findings from an interview study on the role of information interaction in view change. Participants demonstrated a clear interest in a diversity of information, including information specifically opposed to their own views. The second phase reports findings from a diary study specifically designed to investigate people's interactions with information that reflected a different view to theirs. We examine how people found disagreeable information, how they responded to it and the factors affecting their responses. We find that people will sometimes actively seek and engage with disagreeable information, rather than avoid and ignore it. Our findings pave the way for future information interfaces that support this previously undiscussed information interaction.

Abstract Creativity and verification are intrinsic to high‐quality journalism, but their role is often poorly visible in news story creation. Journalists face relentless commercial pressures that threaten to compromise story quality, in a digital era where their ethical obligation not to mislead the public has never been more important. It is therefore crucial to investigate how journalists can be supported to produce stories that are original, impactful, and factually accurate, under tight deadlines. We present findings from 14 semistructured interviews, where we asked journalists to discuss the creation of a recent news story to understand the process and associated human information behavior (HIB). Six overarching behaviors were identified: discovering, collecting, organizing, interrogating, contextualizing, and publishing. Creativity and verification were embedded throughout news story creation and integral to journalists' HIB, highlighting their ubiquity. They often manifested at a micro level; in small‐scale but vital activities that drove and facilitated story creation. Their ubiquitous role highlights the importance of creativity and verification support being woven into functionality that facilitates information acquisition and use in digital information tools for journalists.

There has been considerable hype about filter bubbles and echo chambers influencing the views of information consumers. The fear is that these technologies are undermining democracy by swaying opinion and creating an uninformed, polarised populace. The literature in this space is mostly techno-centric, addressing the impact of technology. In contrast, our work is the first research in the information interaction field to examine changing viewpoints from a human-centric perspective. It provides a new understanding of view change and how we might support informed, autonomous view change behaviour. We interviewed 18 participants about a self-identified change of view, and the information touchpoints they engaged with along the way. In this paper we present the information types and sources that informed changes of viewpoint, and the ways in which our participants interacted with that information. We describe our findings in the context of the techno-centric literature and suggest principles for designing digital information environments that support user autonomy and reflection in viewpoint formation.

Keeping track of design processes is a cumbersome task due to the apparently unconstrained and unstructured nature of creative work. Traceability is fundamental to revisit and reflect on the design narratives that describe artefact evolution. In this paper, we aim to identify what characteristics are necessary to facilitate traceability of creative design processes. For this end, we use a functional prototype to connect artefacts, design rationale, and decisions in a shared workspace. We evaluated this prototype for 15 weeks with six pairs of students engaged in a user-centered design project. Our findings show that having a lean repository of artefacts annotated with design rationale can facilitate tracking progress in different phases of the process. We found that creating a record of the participants' design work is useful to reflect on and for team agreement, ensure consistency of evolving artefacts, and help in planning future steps in the design project.