Activity of understanding a problem during interaction with an “enabling” information retrieval system: Modeling information flow

This article is about the mental coding processes involved in the flow of “information” when the user is interacting with an “enabling” information retrieval (IR) system. An “enabling” IR system is designed to stimulate the user's grasping towards a higher understanding of the information need/problem/task that brought the user to the IR system. C. Shannon's (1949/1959) model of the flow of information, and K. R. Popper's (1975) 3 worlds concept are used to diagram the flow of information between the user and system when the user receives a stimulating system message, with particular emphasis on the decoding and encoding operations involved as the user processes the message. The key difference between the model of information flow proposed here and the linear transmission, receiver‐oriented model now in use is that we assume that users of a truly interactive, “enabling” IR system are primarily message senders, not passive receivers of the message, because they must create a new message back to the system, based on a reconceptualization of their information need, while they are “online” interacting with the system.