Designing autotelic searching experience for casual-leisure by using the user's context

Which is more important: the journey or the destination? Classical Interactive Information Retrieval (IIR) based on work-task scenarios usually puts the emphasis on the destination of the search (the results) with metrics such as precision and recall rather than the search journey. But social media, mobile devices and other pervasive technologies have made information accessible to people in leisure scenarios and open up casual-leisure search behaviours motivated by hedonistic need such as having fun, or relaxing instead of a well-defined information need. During search sessions users might find irrelevant information but they may keep exploring because the IR system satisfies their current leisure need. This research aims to understand better casual-leisure search behaviour and design new IR systems to support autotelic search experiences.