Sensemaking and Transformation (and a whole lot of jargon)

I'm flying back from the Arizona State University's Design Research conference, Exposed '09. The conference was simple and quick, and the contents were straightforward but felt rather uninspired in delivery. I did, however, find some material from one speaker particularly thought-provoking. GK VanPatter, the oft-anonymous source behind the well known NextD, spoke about his vision of the future of Design. GK has been a part of the quiet community of design intellectuals for a long time, and having worked at Scient with John Rheinfrank, it's not surprising that his talk was highly visual, full of rich intellectual content, and embodied primarily in "old school design diagrams" (the same style Hugh Dubberly has helped popularize and that I always appreciate).

Ignoring the sometimes self-aggrandizing promotional material for his company Humantific, the work offered a core view of a push from "Design 1.0" to "Design 4.0" - moving from traditional design (1.0) to product and service design (2.0), to organizational transformation design (3.0) and finally towards social transformation design (4.0). GK took the opportunity to point out that Bruce Nussbaum's latest jump on the "transformation" bandwagon is a day late and a dollar short, and he went on to illustrate - in his view - how offshoring and commoditization have directly led to a necessary push away from form giving and towards strategic problem solving. It's a very solid body of work, although I'm still firmly of the mind that interaction design - as practiced for the past thirty years - encapsulates all of these concepts under the container of "designing for behavior".

What was most enjoyable for me, though, was to hear another person in the larger design community discussing sensemaking. I'm still finding my way through this strange idea of knowledge acquisition and understanding creation, but I've identified a number of competitive and often completely contradictory approaches to sensemaking:

1. The social science point of view. Brenda Dervin describes Sensemaking as an approach to thinking about and implementing communications research and practice.

2. The action-research point of view. Daniel Snowden describes how the Cynefin framework is used as an approach to Sensemaking. 

3. The learning, modeling and intelligence view. Stu Card, Herb Simon, and the other core cog psych figureheads from Carnegie Mellon have captured the essence of knowledge acquisition in the methods of information gathering, representation in a schema, developing insight, and creating a knowledge product.

4. The organizational behavior view. Klein, Moon & Hoffman describe a view of sensemaking embodied in organizational behavior, looking at how large companies deal with issues of "who knows what" - the motivated, continuous effort to understand connections (which can be among people, places and events) in order to anticipate their trajectories and act effectively.

GK VanPatter presented sensemaking in the context of his "3.0" or "4.0" transformative framework. He describes a nice distinction between sensemaking and what he calls "strangemaking". Industrial designers, according to GK, have for years engaged in purposefully changing the way things look, feel, or act so as to appear strange (read: different, novel, or new) simply for the purposes of competitive differentiation. This is ultimately a losing strategy, as there's no substance or authenticity to "strange for strange sake", and so - to quote GK - "The scaling up of sensemaking [the movement from 1.0 to 4.0] is changing what design fundamentally is".

"The scaling up of sensemaking" is a true challenge, because it's going to mean that a generation of designers need to abandon the ingrained need to "make cool stuff" and start thinking more.

It's also going to mean that we need to find clients willing to pay for us to think, instead of just to produce.

Jon Kolko