Uncertainty principles & information systems 9/8

Kulthau concludes by stating that "the uncertainty principle proposes a basis for interaction into the process of learning from information enabling users to move from uncertainty to understanding " (352). I like the idea that information systems need to take the cognitive, affective, and ? areas.

She suggests that future research in the use of information is waranted (353), and an investigation of how systems respond at the 'problem' level (how does it figure out what the user's problem really is?) It seems that assigning this to a system is a daunting task, that users approach systems not with the goal of having it take them through the entire process of uncertainty to discovery but rather to aid in a particular part of the process. Perhaps the system that the user develops to aid them could be though of in this way, much in the way that I have a structured system for managing and marking up documents & readings. For me, this system is integral to the understanding/sensemaking process and I suppose that it counts as an information system, but I don't think that this process would have nearly as much meaning for anyone else? So, if systems ultimately cannot BE to tightly tied to the user, what design principles do we use? Interoperability, Portability, small Widget-style programming? I'm not sure, it seems that familiarity with the systems are in some ways taking precedence over the information itself in its application of new structure to that information (indexes, output formats). Is this a barrier or facilitation to discovery & use of that information?
I am left wondering how Chatman's article on 'life in the round' fits in. Both her article and Kulthau discuss the significant impact that emotions bring to the information seeking process, both describe information seeking processes that are iterative & confronted with problems like how users deal with un-expected information. If I understand Kulthau's constructivist methodology properly, she is approaching research on the information seeking process using quant/qual methods in an attempt to get to the cognitive and affective components of this process. It appears in contrast that Chatman used solely qualitative methods (interviews) to describe an idea of how users interact with information in certain environments. How does Solomon's 'mosaic methodology' fit into this group? He takes an interpretive approach of arranging the various actions of information seeking (starting, chaining, browsing, differentiating, monitoring, extracting, verifying, ending) for users/contexts into patterns (travelers, college students, professionals).

It is easy to recognize my own experience of information seeking while reading these articles, in fact discussion of the emotive components (wonder, frustration, interest level) but I am left wondering how much impact research on the emotional component of info seeking can have. Certainly it is useful in recognizing the state of the user as they approach the process but how would you define or change an interaction/system from knowing anything more about this other than the fact that you are dealing with a person? I'm not saying that these observations are obvious but that perhaps we are expecting to much from the information systems which tend to be designed to offer a simple/objective view of some information. Should the system provide different results based on how I feel?