I'm following the comments here because #1, I wasn't in attendance (neither was anyone else from the Toronto design community presenting either, so good to see what we missed), and #2, some comments on sensemaking.

GK and Humantific/NextD have made some valuable contributions to the practice of sensemaking in design, in particular what they have developed around visual sensemaking. The difference between sensemaking research that you have cited (from Wikipedia? ;) and sensemaking practice is bigger than the difference between theory and practice around a given focus. That's primarily because the researchers look at sensemaking as a multi-sensory, cognitive and affective process of realization about effective courses of attention, located in the individual. NextD has elevated the practice of sensemaking to an activity that people do together to collectively understand and determine their preferred choicemaking directions. Researchers have never defined this as a practice, but as such, it falls closest (in my view) to Brenda Dervin's notion of the dialogical engagement of individual sensemaking about their situation.

I'd also clarify that Karl Weick intiated the organizational sensemaking school of research. Fellow Daytonian Gary Klein initiated the decision-making school of sensemaking based on naturalistic problem-solving and situation awareness. There are no good research summaries of these schools of thought that I have seen. Dr. Dervin's school is closest to Snowden's, while Klein and Weick comprise perhaps another school.

Peter,

Nope, not from Wikipedia - from my own scattered understanding of these phenomenon. Not to get too much into the "who invented what first", but Stu Card and the rest of the folk from PARC and CMU were talking about Sensemaking as a form of cognitive problem solving years ago; Daniel Russell, working with Card, defines sensemaking as “the process of searching for a representation and encoding data in that representation to answer task-specific questions.”

This is a totally different perspective than either Weick or Dervin (and definitely from NextD).

Ultimately, it looks like a "cool name" that's been applied wholesale across the board to everything from a theory of cognition to a theory of organizational decision making. I'm throwing it in the _overused but little understood_ category, along with "Wicked Problems". And we can probably put "derivative trading" in that category, too.

:O

Jon, I'm really jazzed to see you pick this story up actually. Most design researchers don't get why this is important. If they did they would be at the conferences where these folks speak.

The problem with the term sensemaking is that we, designers, never owned it before - so it looks unfamiliar and we think it means "the making of common sense." The reason I got picky on the sensemaking research landscape is that this is not jargon, it is deeply researched territory. And in that landscape, PARC and Russell's notions are a bit later (1993), but do not cite the earlier research. This creates the sense of disconnect, which there is. Dervin and Russell have very little overlap.

Knowing some of these researchers I felt it worthwhile to clarify, since their work deserves serious reflection.

Dervin's SenseMaking Methodology grew from her work in the mid-1970's, when nobody else was thinking about user studies. She was. He first public cite of SMM was I think in 1983. Weick's first paper on Sensemaking was 1989. And Klein's discussion is not so much "sensemaking research" as meta-cognitive organizational behavior research that adapts sensemaking as a descriptive lens. I have a visual map that shows their relationships on 2 scales: Individual - Collective and Information - Situation. While "individual to collective" ranges on a scale, the other dimension (info and situation) is polar and therein lies the big break.