19 A Diary Study of Information Capture at Work Extended abstract Barry A. T. Brown, Kenton O’Hara and Abigail Sellen Barbro@hpl.hp.com, Kenoha@hpl.hp.com , abisel@hpl.hp.com Appliance Design Group Hewlett Packard Labs Bristol BS34 8QZ, UK Advances in technology are increasingly enabling devices which allow for the capture of a wide variety of information or media, whether it be for capture of paper documents, scenes, sound, or hand-written notes. The boom in digital cameras is perhaps the most salient example, but we are also seeing an increasing number of gadgets hit the market in the form of voice recorders, video cameras and document scanners. Not only are such devices becoming more ubiquitous, but they are also becoming more personal: they are becoming smaller, more portable, and in some cases more specialised for particular kinds of information capture. In addition, we are seeing more diverse and sophisticated software for delivering, manipulating, storing and viewing captured information. These capabilities, coupled with huge advances in computer storage capacity mean that we will not only be able to capture but also store more of life’s experiences. While developers of information capture devices such as digital cameras can be safe in the knowledge of how cameras will be used and thus design their technology accordingly, there are many products currently on the market whose use or (to use marketing speak) whose “value proposition” is not well defined. Sometimes, as a result, such products fail to be marketed appropriately or are designed with unclear use models. At other times, users themselves will surprise developers by finding their own uses for such devices – ones they may not have predicted in prospect. From the point of view of the design and development of information capture devices, therefore, it is valuable to know in advance how particular kinds of capture devices might be used. In order to begin to unpack these issues, we designed a study to investigate in more detail the many different ways in which information capture does and can occur, and what this means for the design of new capture technologies. In order to provide data grounded in people’s real life experiences, and which also allows for rich descriptions, we chose a diary method paired with a series of semi-structured interviews. Diary methods are a popular data collection technique in sociology, but are still relatively rare in technology studies. We have been developing our own form of this methodology in the areas of reading (Adler, Gujar, Harrison, O'Hara, & Sellen, 1998), paper use (Sellen & Harper, 1997), and the research behaviour of library users (O'Hara, Smith, Newman, & Sellen, 1998). Eleven professionals who worked in Hewlett Packard took part in the study, with subjects being asked to use digital cameras as a diary tool for one week, recording incidents where they wanted to capture some information, in any form. Instructions to subjects were kept deliberately vague so as to elicit as wide a sampling of “capture incidents” as possible. These photographs were then used in semi-structured end of day interviews to discuss different aspects of the professionals capture behaviour. The findings are discussed in three parts. We start by discussing a categorisation of the data into ten different “categories of capture”. Capture activities were categorised in terms of the whole activity. Specifically, we were most interested in the reasons why people wanted to capture information and how they wanted to go on to use the information as opposed to details about what and how information was captured. These categories are listed in Table 1. As an example: capture to post in a common information space refers to examples of situations in which people wanted to capture information in order to display it on a common noticeboard, on a whiteboard or wall, in order to be visible and available to a group of people. Taking a view of the complete “capture action” like this helps to explain some of the choices which are made at the point of capture.