While information systems and technology are being developed at an accelerated pace, our understanding of how humans interact with them remains very limited. Through empirically-based field studies, researchers at the University of Washington’s Center for Human-Information Interaction address how current information systems and technologies could serve their users effectively. The results of these studies are used as a basis for producing realistic and useful design requirements. The research focuses on the study of human-information interaction in the workplace, using the Cognitive Work Analysis framework.

Areas of research expertise include: information behavior, information retrieval, knowledge organization, and empirical methods for workplace studies.

Developed in the 1970s at the Department of Systems Analysis at Risø National Laboratory in Denmark, Cognitive Work Analysis provides a multi-pronged analytical framework for studying various human interactions with information. It helps researchers and other professionals to study the work people do, the tasks they perform, the decisions they make, the way they interact with information channels, systems and products, and the collaborative, organizational and social context in which they perform their work—all for the purpose of designing more effective systems and services. Cognitive Work Analysis is one of the few conceptual frameworks that provides researchers with a way to study both task and context simultaneously and offers up a mechanism to transfer results from an in-depth analysis of human-information interaction directly to design requirements.

The primary mission of the Center for Human-Information Interaction is to become an intellectual center for Cognitive Work Analysis in the United States, engage in basic research and become a host to international conferences, workshops and trainings. Our purpose is to nurture a vibrant and innovative scholarly environment which focuses upon three activities: research, instruction, and industry consultation.

The major goals of the Center for Human-Information Interaction are to: