Significant Patterns and IS design

Dewey takes a few steps towards a differentiation of the concept of experience, such as the distinction between primary and secondary experience, or between ordinary (partial, raw, primitive) experience and complete, aesthetic experience.(Hohr, 2013)

This could be applied in IS design as

ordinary (partial, raw, primitive) experience — could be understand as objects stored in DB, and presented accordingly to deterministic IS functions

complete, aesthetic experience — as contextual information about interaction of users and a objects in IS.

“Context is any information that can be used to characterize the situation of an entity. An entity is a person, place, or object that is considered relevant to the interaction between a user and an application, including the user and applications themselves.” Dey (2000)

In our view such contextual information could be represented in quantitative terms as a pattern (patterns can be easily described by machine quantitatively, making them different from behavior, which is qualitative and hard to recognize by machines)

We define patterns as a time sequence happening between the moment when an agent experiences information (i.e., when structured data become information) and the information-searching and seeking process starts until the moment when the agent stops interaction with the structured data as his information needs are satisfied. (Lugovic, Dunđer, Horvat, 2015)

And they convey two experiences; ordinary (partial, raw, primitive) and complete, aesthetic experience create significant pattern.

Significant refers to the cultural and mental side of the sign, to its symbolic meaning, i.e. to its relationship to thought, to human practices, to shared experience, pattern refers to the physical side of the sign and includes all kinds of patterns, such as visual patterns, acoustic patterns, movement patterns, and linguistic and text patterns.(Hohr, 2013)

Enriching the pattern description with meaning, relationship of thoughts, human practice (that could be understand as a socio technical system behavior) and shared experience produce new symbols (with related set of properties) and those symbols that are basic ingredient of information processing systems. (Note 1)

But defining significant pattern is not enough, what is needed is the signal, as signal trigger the information processing in the system. In our view difference between significant patterns is actually that signal. For example if we could recognize that significance is changing (such as

a) change in human practice of accessing information, for example sales people in organization starts to access different documents in the corporate IS

b) new social behavior as a result of information resources accessed, for example analyzing meeting requests as correlation of particular documents access

c) different meaning of the documents is created, for example users retrieve new set of documents to full fill their information needs

d) shared experience, for example change of affective states of the IS users

Such a signal could be also used in terms of machine learning, as a feature on which machine could learn about users. By doing so we establishing the necessary sources of messages IS is processing with aim to learn about users experiences.

Note 1

Symbol systems* are almost the quintessential artifacts, for adaptivity to an environment is their whole raison d’être (reason for existence). They are goal- seeking, information-processing systems, usually enlisted in the service of the larger systems in which they are incorporated……It must have means for acquiring information from the external environment that can be encoded into internal symbols, as well as means for producing symbols that initiate action upon the environment. Thus it must use symbols to designate objects and relations and actions in the world external to the system.…Symbol systems are called “physical” to remind the reader that they exist as real- world devices, fabricated of glass and metal (computers) or flesh and blood (brains). (*In the literature the phrase information-processing system is used more frequently than symbol system. I will use the two terms as synonyms.)

Herbert Simon, The Science of Artificial

Dey, A.K., Providing Architectural Support for Building Context-aware Applications, Ph.D. thesis, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA, director, Gregory D. Abowd, 2000.

Hohr, H. (2013). The concept of experience by John Dewey revisited: Conceiving, feeling and “Enliving”. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 32(1), 25–38. ( https://www.uio.no/studier/emner/uv/uv/UV9406/hohr-the-concept-of-experience-by-john-dewey-author-s-version.pdf )