Information Farming: From Berry Picking to Berry Growing

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 natural evolution in how people engage with information. Drawing on historical analogy and empirical evidence, we examine the benefits and opportunities of information farming, its implications for design and evaluation, and the accompanying risks posed by this transition. We hypothesize that as GenAI technologies proliferate, cultivating information will increasingly supplant transient, patch-based foraging as a dominant mode of engagement, marking a broader shift in human-information interaction and its study.