Information Refinement Technologies for Crisis Informatics - User Expectations and Design Principles for Social Media and Mobile Apps

Marc-André Kaufhold explores user expectations and design implications for the utilization of new media in crisis management and response. He develops a novel framework for information refinement, which integrates the event, organisational, societal, and technological perspectives of crises. Therefore, he reviews the state of the art on crisis informatics and empirically examines the use, potentials and barriers of both social media and mobile apps. Based on these insights, he designs and evaluates ICT concepts and artifacts with the aim to overcome the issues of information overload and quality in large-scale crises, concluding with practical and theoretical implications for technology adaptation and design. 

About the author: 

Marc-André Kaufhold is a postdoc at the Chair of Science and Technology for Peace and Security (PEASEC) in the Department of Computer Science at the Technical University of Darmstadt. His research focuses on the user-centred design and evaluation of mobile apps and social media technologies in the context of crisis and security research.