Everyone engages in sense-making whether searching the Web, wading through boxes of documents or analyzing volumes of message traffic. Computers have a role to play, not just in processing ever-increasing amounts of information faster, but in augmenting our abilities to make sense of it all. Cognitive task analysis is the key to understanding sense-making activities and finding the technological leverage points.

Creativity often emerges out of the tension between two seemingly irreconcilable properties that a particular design or product should have. By creating a higher order synthesis that honors the essential elements, a creative solution arises. There is also a tension of opposites in methods for creative work: cultivating a “prepared mind” versus cultivating a “beginner’s mind.” Advice for the prepared mind says “Develop and use your experience” and advice for the beginner’s mind advice says “Discard your previous experience.” How can we effectively use these seemingly opposite pieces of advice?

This work compares user performance on a shape grouping task with a folder-based interface and a zooming interface. There was a significant difference in task completion times between the two interfaces, with subjects performing 30% faster with the zooming interface than with folders.

A breakthrough creates something new or satisfies a previously undiscovered need. Radical breakthroughs often have uses and effects far beyond what their inventors had in mind and can launch new industries or transform existing ones. Our capacity for breakthroughs depends on a combination of science, imagination and business; the next waves of innovation will come from organizations that get this combination right. The stories in this book, told by repeat inventors and managers of technology, uncover the best practices for inventing the future.

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In "The Digital Library Project: The World of Knowbots" in Part 1, Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf ask, "If a thousand books are combined on a single CD-ROM and the acquirer of the CD-ROM only intends to read one of them, what sort of royalty arrangement is appropriate to compensate the copyright owners? How would compensation be extended for cases in which electronic copies are provided to users?" Their questions show how, in 1988, issues about copyright protection and payment for using information arose in the context of early CD-ROM distribution. By 1994 copyright issues had not only not been settled, they were coming to a boil. Laura Fillmore's effort to build a successful publishing business on the Internet reveals the limitations of what was practical in May of 1994. Although digital works were being sold on the Internet, provisions for commerce were primitive. Furthermore, the ease of copying digital works had led many people to believe that digital information should be free. Fast access to the network had made trading programs or other data as easy as mixing songs on audio tape. In short, it had become much simpler for network users to infringe copyright than to uphold it. This is the context for the oft-quoted statement by John Perry Barlow of the Electronic Freedom Foundation, "Copyright is dead." Advocates of free information argue that because you don't lose the original when you make a copy of a digital work, there should be no charge for copying information. The conventional wisdom among publishers in late-1994, when this article was written, was that digital containers for software were inherently leaky vessels and that no viable solution would ever be found.

Making sense of a body of data is a common activity in any kind of analysis. Sensemaking is the process of searching for a representation and encoding data in that representation to answer task-specific questions. Different operations during sensemaking require different cognitive and external resources. Representation are chosen and changed to reduce the cost of operations in an information processing task. The power of theses representational shifts is generally under-appreciated as is the relation between sensemaking and information retrieval. We analyze sensemaking tasks and develop a model of the cost structure of sensemaking. We discuss implications for the integrated design of user interfaces, representational tools, and information retrieval systems.