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From the perspective of information ethics, one of the purposes of human life is flourishing. This means people ought to be free to engage in creative and flexible actions that allow the fullest realization of their potential as intelligent, decision-making agents – i.e., those actions that a person experiences as meaningful. Researchers have suggested that many people in the post-industrial West experience a lack of meaning in their lives, and this “crisis of meaning” is implicated in many of society's ills; consequently many people are not flourishing as they might. Flourishing relies on information access, processing, and understanding, as well as a particular meaningful experiential dimension of information activities. To speak of information experience, personally meaningful activities are experienced as self-constructive ones, characterized by focused curiosity and presence, and which have a central practice that is supported by peripheral practices. Examples of personally meaningful information behavior from the serious leisure hobby of ultramarathon running are discussed as illustration. In reaching for a more ethical information society, we should seek to infuse more of our information activities with deeper personal meaning.

How is understanding built? This chapter operationalizes the discussion from the previous chapters to offer some design strategies for creating information systems that promote the building of understanding. These strategies are, namely, multiple perspectives, slowness, and intentional struggle. Examples of and existing literature on these design strategies are discussed.

Information studies is concerned with information, but what is information for? That question is usually answered with reference to epistemic aims, the default of which is generally assumed to be knowledge. Following recent work in epistemology, this chapter argues that, from the perspective of information experience, understanding is an epistemic aim well suited to the field. Understanding refers to the grasping of inferential and explanatory relationships among a body of information. Two forms of understanding can be distinguished: ontological and ontic. Ontological understanding is the background activity through which perception and mentation happen. Thus, ontological understanding is a matter of an agent's conscious and experiential engagement with their environment – in short, it is one's making sense of their situation. Over this background, ontic understanding is made. Ontic understanding can be defined as a coherent and self-transparent network of knowledge that has been constructed by a conscious agent through ontological understanding. All in all, the concept of understanding provides an account for how bodily experience, recorded information, and other forms of information can contribute epistemically in concert.