Keeping It Real: How Do You Find Your—and Everyone’s—Everyday Information?

Meet Our Keynote Presenter

Everyday life information about health, community, employment, civics, relationships, shopping, culture, and more is intrinsic to existence—part of our social information fabric. For eons this has been created and shared socially per cultural norms and always affected by changing demographics, technology, and economics. This sort of everyday information is intrinsic to our existence, and yet intangible, hard to describe, always moving, and never indexed—like trying to catch lightning in a bottle.

During Ms. Fisher's keynote presentation at the ASI Conference, she will address the key information places in people’s everyday lives from doctors’ offices to book clubs, Delta row 17, OKCupid and Instagram, consider the role of young people as information wayfarers (info-tech mediaries), and draw out the challenges for making everyday life information accessible.

Dr. Karen E. Fisher is a Professor in the University of Washington Information School and Adjunct Professor of Communication. She teaches and conducts research on how people experience information as part of everyday life, with emphasis on the interpersonal aspects of information behavior, the role of informal social settings or “information grounds” in information flow, as well as the broad impacts of information and communication technologies. Her InfoMe.uw.edu work is supported by the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services, the LEGO Foundation, Google, and Microsoft; it uses the collaborative Teen Design Day methodology, and a large-scale survey, to ask how youth create and use information and technology on behalf of other people, especially older family members, and how this phenomenon can be supported through information technology, services and policy. To date, InfoMe has engaged immigrant and refugee/ethnic minority teens from East Africa, Myanmar and Thailand, Latin America, and the Middle East (Al-Za’atari, Jordan), and builds on Karen’s earlier work funded by the National Science Foundation (“Talking with You”) and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (“U.S. Impact Study”). A world-renowned speaker and collaborator, Karen is from Newfoundland, Canada and began her career working with the Inuit People of Labrador.