Emily Hu

information design, distributed cognition, TV news, television control room, director

Information design is to present the delivered messages by using collection, integration in order to help the users understand knowledge in an effective way. The journalism industry performs this everyday. The current issues rely on their immediacy; thus, the biggest challenge is definitely the speed. My research is to discuss how the journalists complete their tasks by using the approach of distributed cognition. The researchers have found some emergent cases in television control rooms that even though the organization has already designed information earlier; design itself is not the present perfect but the present progressive instead. In the past, the TV directors do the actions after thinking through it. One command after another, they lead the TV team as the teamwork pattern. However, with the importance of immediacy, the preparation time has to be simultaneous among the team members. They have developed to be flexible and spontaneous so that they can make a good use of the resources in the TV environment. In this process, cognition performs locally within the changes of whatever situations.