Information Farming: From Berry Picking to Berry Growing
Leif Azzopardi, Adam Roegiest

TL;DR
This paper introduces 'Information Farming' as a new paradigm for human-information interaction, emphasizing cultivation and structured workflows enabled by GenAI, replacing traditional foraging models.
Contribution
It conceptualizes Information Farming as an evolution in information engagement, supported by historical analogy and empirical evidence, highlighting its benefits, design implications, and risks.
Findings
Information farming enables structured, cultivated workflows over time.
GenAI technologies facilitate a shift from foraging to farming of information.
This transition has significant implications for design, evaluation, and understanding of human-information interaction.
Abstract
The classic paradigms of Berry Picking and Information Foraging Theory have framed users as gatherers, opportunistically searching across distributed sources to satisfy evolving information needs. However, the rise of GenAI is driving a fundamental transformation in how people produce, structure, and reuse information - one that these paradigms no longer fully capture. This transformation is analogous to the Neolithic Revolution, when societies shifted from hunting and gathering to cultivation. Generative technologies empower users to "farm" information by planting seeds in the form of prompts, cultivating workflows over time, and harvesting richly structured, relevant yields within their own plots, rather than foraging across others people's patches. In this perspectives paper, we introduce the notion of Information Farming as a conceptual framework and argue that it represents a…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsInnovative Human-Technology Interaction · Interactive and Immersive Displays · Data Visualization and Analytics
