Midi de la recherche SIO
When Data Becomes Reality: Effective Use Under Opacity in Sleep Tracking

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Midi de la recherche SIO avec Annamina Rieder

Le Département de systèmes d’information organisationnels vous invite à une présentation de la professeure Annamina Rieder sur sa recherche portant sur l’utilisation de systèmes de suivi du sommeil.

Effective use—defined as engaging with an information system (IS) in ways that advance users’ goals—rests on the assumption that system representations faithfully reflect an underlying phenomenon. This assumption is challenged when IS represent a domain that is opaque. Under opacity, referents may be inaccessible, and representational faithfulness can therefore not be assessed easily. This study examines how effective use unfolds when referential grounding is unavailable, specifically, how users obtain and act upon representations under these conditions in the context of consumer sleep tracking, where sleep is inherently unobservable and primarily known through system outputs. Drawing on narrative interviews with 61 users, the study identifies three generative mechanisms—reflexive performance, objectifying subjectivity, and rationalizing experience—that produce distinct patterns of effective use. The findings shift representational faithfulness from an objective correspondence view to a perceptive notion and extend effective use by theorizing learning distributed across humans and systems.