Creative Information Use Among Young Adults : Challenges for Learning and Opportunities for Media (Re)Design

Despite spending significant amounts of time on the Internet, today's young adults often do not use online information effectively to support their creative pursuits--an activity we refer to as creative information use. In this exploratory study, we interviewed 19 media art college students in Hong Kong to understand their creative information use and to identify the challenges they faced in engaging with creative information online. The interviews reveal that young adults lacked sufficient media literacy to negotiate information online. More importantly, our study suggests that parents, teachers, and peers often failed to collectively sustain young adults' media-related interests and creativity development. We discuss research gaps in HCI and the design of technologies, and raise important issues of creative information use for future studies.