[Paper Review] A Guided Tour Study of the Untidy But Inspirational PIM of Visual Artists

Helene Hellmich, Jesse David Dinneen|arXiv (Cornell University)|Jun 9, 2023

Personal Information Management and User BehaviorDecision Sciences3 citations

TL;DR

This study explores the personal information management (PIM) practices of six practicing visual artists through guided tours and interviews, revealing that their PIM is characterized by serendipity, visual organization, and emotional value, despite disorganization. The key contribution is a nuanced understanding of artists' unique PIM challenges—especially assessing personal information value—and actionable recommendations for software designers, cultural institutions, and artists themselves.

ABSTRACT

While all individuals deal with increasingly large amounts of digital information in their everyday lives and professionally, prior works suggest visual artists have unique information management practices and challenges. This study therefore examined the personal information management (PIM) practices and challenges of six practising visual artists using guided tours and short interviews. It was found that the visual artists had some unique practices connected to their strong emphasis on serendipity, inspiration, and visual dimensions of information. Like non-artists, the participants faced challenges across all phases of PIM, chiefly an excess of information and fragmented organisation, and they found it especially hard to assess how personal and valuable their information could be. After characterising this rarely discussed PIM demographic, we draw on the findings to provide concrete recommendations for artists doing PIM, for information and cultural heritage institutions, and for designers of PIM software.

Motivation & Objective

• To understand the unique personal information management (PIM) practices of visual artists in contrast to non-artists.
• To identify the specific challenges artists face in organizing and assessing their digital information.
• To examine how visual, emotional, and serendipitous elements shape artists’ information handling.
• To provide evidence-based recommendations for PIM software, cultural heritage institutions, and artists themselves.

Proposed method

• Conducted guided tours of participants’ digital workspaces to observe real-time PIM behaviors.
• Supplemented with short, semi-structured interviews to explore motivations and challenges behind observed practices.
• Focused on capturing the visual, emotional, and serendipitous dimensions of information management.
• Used qualitative analysis to identify recurring patterns in information organization, storage, and assessment.
• Mapped PIM phases (acquisition, organization, retrieval, use, sharing) to identify pain points across the lifecycle.
• Emphasized context-rich, in-situ observation to reveal tacit and non-linear PIM strategies.

Experimental results

Research questions

• RQ1 How do visual artists organize and manage their digital information in practice, particularly in relation to visual and inspirational content?
• RQ2 What unique challenges do visual artists face in assessing the personal and long-term value of their information?
• RQ3 In what ways do serendipity and visual cues shape the PIM practices of visual artists?
• RQ4 How do artists’ PIM behaviors differ from those of non-artists across the PIM lifecycle?
• RQ5 What design and institutional interventions could better support artists’ information management needs?

Key findings

• Visual artists frequently rely on serendipity and visual cues rather than structured metadata, leading to fragmented but personally meaningful information organization.
• Participants struggled to assess the personal and long-term value of information, especially when it was not immediately useful or visually compelling.
• Despite disorganization, artists reported high emotional and creative attachment to their information, particularly inspiration-related materials.
• The study found that all PIM phases—especially acquisition and assessment—were burdened by information overload and lack of clear criteria for retention.
• Artists’ PIM practices were deeply intertwined with their creative processes, making traditional PIM models inadequate for capturing their needs.
• The findings highlight a need for PIM tools that support visual browsing, emotional tagging, and flexible, non-linear organization.