SOMETHING NEW, SOMETHING OLD, SOMETHING RADICAL?

The term information design is being offered in this volume as a designator of a new arena of activity. Part of the logic inherent in the presentation is the assumption that as a species we face altered circumstances which demand this new practice. In one version of the call -- a version which I submit can be fairly labeled as the dominant version -- it is assumed that prior to the advance of the new communication technologies there was no pressing need for information design. It is assumed that without the intervention of these increasingly unnatural channels humans achieved economical and effective distribution of information through existing channels in natural and intuitive ways. Further, it is assumed that beginning with the invention of the printing press and escalating to the explosion of communication technologies at the end of this century, more and more the artificialities of channels both technological and social have imposed themselves on information distribution.

All of this allows us to conjure up benign scenarios of the good old days when human talked directly to human and through gesture, talk, song, story, drum, and crafted sign or picture conveyed to each other something we call information. All of this forces us to be worried about the potential ethical and practical consequences of any call for a profession of information design. This profession, it seems, will be doing something unnatural to information which we had better watchdog; but, on the other hand, we need this profession to correct the unnatural impacts on information arising from communication technologies.

This approach to this new concept -- information design -- nests within it a host of assumptions about the nature of reality, human beings, and this something called information. Lengthy papers could be written on any one of them. Granting that there are many strong arguments implied by these assumptions, I want in this chapter to start by challenging the idea that information design is a new idea, or alternatively merely a new idea.

If I am given the indulgence to reduce things briefly to a polarity, it is useful to start by submitting that there are at least two ways to conceptualize information. One way, implicit in the assumptions above, is that information is something that describes an ordered reality and has some knowable or at least idealized isomorphic relationship to that reality. In short, information instructs us, this assumption says, about the nature of the world we live in: its history, its future, its functioning, our place in it, our possible actions, and potential consequences of these actions. Information, conceptualized this way, must be seen as enormously valuable. Such information inherently offers survival value, instructions for not only living but living well. Any human who rejected such instruction would have to be termed ipso facto seriously out of touch with reality. And, clearly, such a set of assumptions makes the economic and effective distribution of information uncontested mandates.(1)

This way of conceptualizing information implies within it that the somethings labeled information can be distributed readily from time to time, place to place, person to person.(2) In order to follow this metaphor to its conclusion we must put aside temporarily our misgivings about the capacities of humans as observers. This view of information conceptualizes human limitations as troublesome difficulties which are addressed with a variety of checking procedures (e.g. in science, replication, reliability, and assessment of error; in journalism, source documentation and internship; in the professions, expert standards and rigorous education). Aside from these troublesome difficulties which require these correcting procedures , information is conceptualized as a natural thing potentially movable from place to place by natural forces. In our current circumstances, it is only because unnatural forces are at work that we must worry about information design.

An alternative view of information -- another metaphor -- contests this entire scenario. In this view there is nothing natural about information. Information no matter what it is called -- data, knowledge or fact, song, story, or metaphor -- has always been designed. In this view information design is at least a very old practice. But, of course, this is not historically accurate if we are attending to the expression of the idea in western discourse for, in fact, discussions of information as something other than isomorphic representation of reality are a relatively recent historical phenomena. So it may be more appropriate to position the term information design as not merely a new idea, but a radical idea.

What would be radical about this idea is that it attempts not merely to correct deleterious impacts of technologies but rather that it attempts to introduce into practice the latest philosophic assumptions about the nature of something we call information and its relationship to some other things we call reality and we call human beings.

This is an important point for the reader advancing into the main body of this chapter. The evidence is already accumulating that the enormous flexible powers of the new communication technologies are being used to do what we have already done in the past only on far larger scales, much faster, at further distances, and with greater temporal repetitiveness. The scale of the enterprises may suggest to the casual observer that there are more biases and intrusions on natural processes than ever before. It is certainly possible to garner evidence to support this argument. However, when one takes a hard look at fundamentals and sets aside issues of scale the information design offered by the new technologies is not that much different than that offered by the town crier, the village elder, the county parson, or the traditional head of a family. This issue will be discussed in some detail below.

It is the premise of this chapter that to assume somehow that information design is a new practice can only deter us from facing head-on some alternative conceptualizations of what that activity could be about. In the succeeding sections of this chapter, I will first present a brief history of our treatments of the concept "information" discussing the implications of each for a practice called information design. Based on this discussion, I will extract a list of guiding principles important for any theory of the practice of information design. I will then present an exemplar theory, methodology, and practice called Sense- Making which embodies these principles. Finally, I will conclude with illustrations of the application of the approach to practical situations.

A BRIEF PHILOSOPHIC HISTORY OF INFORMATION

The terms theory, philosophy, and methodology are bandied about with so many meanings that one must start by proclaiming one's definitional intentions. What I mean to present here is a brief history of theories regarding information that have informed the belief systems that guide our current practices in information/communication systems. My history focuses primarily on philosophical considerations -- how these different theories have conceptualized the interrelationships between four major concepts: reality, observing, information, and power. In this sense, then, I am dealing with various branches of philosophy, in particular ontology (focusing on the nature of reality and being) and, epistemology (focusing on the nature of observing and the standards used to judge the results). Necessarily because of the brevity of my presentation, I must focus on a deliberately extracted set of ideal types or stereotypes with apologies to the seemingly infinite variations on these themes offered in the literature. I will bring together these threads of attention by encapsulating them in six narratives about information: stories which capture the major guidances each of these theories offers us for the practice of information design. Each successive narrative is proposed as being a more recent philosophic development in western thought. Because of this, I have numbered the narratives #1 (earliest ideas historically) to #6 (most recent ideas historically).

NARRATIVE #1: INFORMATION IS, AND THE POWERFUL HAVE IT.

NARRATIVE #2: INFORMATION IS FOUND BY THOSE WHO KNOW HOW TO LOOK.

In this view of information a standard of judgment is introduced -- the standard of accuracy and it's accompanying standard of expertise. Instead of inherited power or the power of brute force privileging the designers of information, it is those who are judged expert who do the designing. Necessarily, systems which operate on these ideas about information must invest energies into maintaining user acceptance of those deemed expert; and, those in power can not exert their force directly but must enlist or co-opt the assistance of experts. Information design, in this view, focuses both on the assumed-to-be- essentialist categories of narrative #1 and also on the observing capabilities of observers -- e.g. scientists, scholars, journalists, professionals -- with the resulting development of various personality and demography oriented theories of information processing.

NARRATIVE #3: INFORMATION IS FOUND IN PARTICULAR TIME-SPACES BY THOSE WITH THE RIGHT OR SKILL TO LOOK.

In the everyday conduct of human affairs, this idea of information is most commonly labeled as cultural relativity where it is assumed that understandings of the world and experience are relevant in specific cultural contexts. Within each cultural context, we still must worry about the warrant by which we judge the observing and, thus, we revert within cultures either to narrative #1 or narrative #2. From here we arrive, for example, at the idea of the key informant of traditional anthropology -- the knowledgeable observer on a given culture who has access to a more comprehensive, more accurate view either because of a position of authority and/or exceptional observing capabilities and opportunities. Again, we find information design focuses on source, this time source within culture. Further, we see that power plays out its drama much as in narrative #1 and #2.

NARRATIVE #4: INFORMATION IS EVERYWHERE, EVERYONE HAS IT.

One response to this narrative has been a vigorous attempt to identify patterns in human cognitive processes which help us understand differences in human information seeking. It is important to note, however, that in this narrative the emphasis is still on the seeking and finding. The information is out there. The trouble is humans stand between us and it and the simple error conceptualizations of narrative #2 or cultural conceptualizations of narrative #3 are not sufficient to account for this human intervention.

In one sense, this narrative offers an alternative theory about how to account for differences in human information processing. When pushed to an extreme, however, the information conceptualized in such a narrative begins to have very little in common with the earlier narratives because there is a contradiction inherent in the conceptualization. On the one hand, we are still focusing on seeking and finding something out there. But, on the other hand, there is no universal authority, expertise, or standard by which the something found can be assessed so there us no way to rationalize obtained differences.

On the one hand such a narrative seems to celebrate individuality and thus is an attractive narrative for the design of information/communication systems in the United States where liberal democratic ideas have privileged individual over collective action. On the other hand, because the narrative merely reifies individuality without giving it reason, it can not disperse power's control over information design any differently than the preceding narratives.

NARRATIVE #5: INFORMATION IS NOT, NO ONE HAS IT.

While narratives #1 through #4 hold tight to the idea of ontological order and, thus, to the idea of information as something which can instruct humans about that order, narrative #5 crashes this view to the ground. Drawing from various readings in the genre frequently labeled "postmodern", this narrative takes the issue of ontology -- the nature of reality and being -- out of consideration. In most forms it brackets reality, putting it aside as an unknowable concern. In some forms, it implies a chaotic reality. In either case, it abandons the possibility of any kind of systematic knowing based on any kind of universal external standard of judgment.

In most versions of this narrative information and knowledge are seen as arising within the discourses of an episteme. If there is a reality out there, this view sees it as manifest solely through interpretation in discourse. In this view, there is no direct route to reality nor any methodological correction for indirect routes, as offered in narratives #1 to #4. There is no stable source of truth, no grand narrative to encompass all narratives. Whether anything called information is to be found, this narrative says we are seeing an order imposed on disorder, on human decenteredness and unconsciousness by power and system and structure. Power, system, structure are all unnatural, imposed orderlinesses.

In one sense, this narrative suggests that information design is an impossibility. Yet, there is within this narrative two insights useful to information design. One is the call that comes from within this narrative for deconstruction -- for unraveling and disclosing the ways in which power is enscribed in information. The second is the challenge the narrative offers to the theories of human beings that we use in our system designs -- theories that, rooted as they are in narrative #1, are usually too tidy, too conscious, too cognitive, too rational, too centered. This narrative calls for us to decenter our human being and, by implication, consider this decentered human being in our designs.

NARRATIVE #6: INFORMATION IS DESIGNED: HUMANS MAKE IT AND UNMAKE IT.

While narrative #6 builds on earlier narratives for its epistemological position, in some senses it radically departs for its ontological position. Instead of choosing between order and chaos, this narrative takes on the ontological question by neither accepting the ordered reality of narratives #1 to #4 nor the bracketed/chaotic reality of narrative #5. Instead, it posits that humans live in a reality that sometimes manifests itself in orderly ways and which sometimes manifests itself in chaotic ways. Reality is, thus, axiomatically assumed as both ordered and chaotic.

The importance of this ontological position is in its implications for how systems handle human differences in information-making. In narratives #1 through #4 after tarrying with all the reasons why people see the world differently, these approaches can not resolve difference or ameliorate it except tautologically: people see the world differently because they differ. There is no mandate in this logic for one human to learn from another. At this point, the solipsism becomes unbearable, and we retreat to reality for resolution. But each chronological advance in our theories of information makes this retreat more and more difficult, and ultimately impossible as manifested in narrative #5.

In contrast, narrative #6 forces a different resolution with profound implications for information design. The resolution is that in the face of differences we must look not for differences in how humans, individually and collectively, see their worlds, but differences in how they make their worlds . In this view, there is more than a mandate for understanding how others see the world, there is an ontological necessity. If we conceptualize humans as struggling through an incomplete reality then the strugglings of others may well be informative to our own.

Notice here how we must jettison much traditional baggage -- the idea, for example, that there is an amount or kind of information that can fully instruct movement. This narrative does not direct us to construct theories of madness or badness in order to explain why some humans seem to never get instructed. Rather, this narrative assumes an inherent ontological lack of complete instruction introduced both by movement in time-space as well as gaps in physical, natural, and/or social reality. By assuming ontological chaos as well as order, we force ourselves to understand that it may be more powerful to conceptualize human beings not as information seeking and finding, but as information designing.

Sometimes these information designings seem suggestive of a reality that is ordered, where a consensus regarding observing -- process, product, and consequences -- produces an informative result we call fact because its application to material conditions produced reliable and useful results. But the only way we can account for the overbearing evidence that today's fact is s tomorrow's folly or worse the cause of tomorrow's rebellion is to reconceptualize what is involved in facts. Fact as a word has traditionally implied essentialist meaning: a fact is. On the other hand, factizing as a verb suggests that among the many ways in which people make their worlds is a proceduring, a designing called making facts. There are many other verbs, of course. A brief beginning of a suggestive list might include: factizing, emoting, comparing, concluding, predicting, consequenting, avoiding, communing, creating, opinioning, socializing, imposing, terrorizing, inculcating, challenging, resisting, destroying.

With this simple idea -- that whatever it is that humans make informationally of their worlds they are always involved in acts of design -- we can pull together the threads offered by the discussion above with a view of humans as themselves ordered and chaotic moving through a reality that is ordered and chaotic. In this view the traditional meanings for the term "information" no longer make much sense. Perhaps eventually the species will jettison the term as having too much old baggage. In the meantime, we can suggest that humans make sense individually and collectively as they move: from order to disorder, from disorder to order.

This narrative refocuses our attention away from information as such to the constant design and redesign of the sense by which humans make and unmake their worlds. This narrative catapults us out of the myriad polarizations which permeate discussion of information/ communication systems. On one side we have order and its companion words: universal, objective, deductive, structure, reason, the modern, the social, centered; on the other side we have chaos and its companion words: contextual, subjective, inductive, individual, emotional, the postmodern, the personal, decentered. In contrast, narrative #6 focuses on the in-between: the making and unmaking, the maintaining and the resisting, the confirming and the destroyiung.

Because of its emphasis on information as designed and redesigned; as made, confirmed, supported, challenged, resisted, and destroyed, this approach positions power as a primary consideration rather than as afterthought. Borrowing from narrative #5, this narrative requires that the power enscribed in information be subject to continuing deconstruction. One possible consequence would be a capacity in information system design to avoid the ways in which systems now automatically build in inequities In essence, we can see our current design situation as one where information is assumed to be natural but is designed. Because it is designed without attention it fits the needs, struggles and resources of the designers. This puts all others at disadvantage. Theories must be constructed of why these others don't make use of all this valuable information. Enter theories of madness or badness.

Enter, too, all the protests that humans are too chaotic and overbearingly different to make responsive system design possible. If in fact we have developed our theories of information and our resulting systems based on narratives #1 to #4, then ultimately difference is always measured against a standard. The system is x, people who can not or will not use it are not x. When attempts are made to understand these others results show both a lack of understanding and disinterest accompanied by an overbearing solipsism. This in turn leads to conclusions that information designed for these others must be reduced to the lowest common denominator or the others must be market segmented into a category of masses to be entertained. Because our conclusions are so theoretically consistent with our assumptions, implicit or explicit, it rarely occurs to us that we are trapped in our own cage and that the low predictive and explanatory capacities of our theories of human information use might be consequences of our own making.

Further, while it is convenient for us to fall back on theories of madness or badness by concluding that these problems affect only the less educated, there is ample evidence to suggest otherwise. One can easily put forth an argument that in the context of our current approaches to information design every citizen is at least sometimes information poor.

SOME PRINCIPLES FOR A THEORY OF INFORMATION DESIGN

For purposes of our discussion here, I will label narrative #6 a communication perspective on information. The central idea is that information is made and unmade in communication -- intrapersonal, interpersonal, social, organizational, national, and global. This view of information mandates that information design would focus not on information as a thing to be economically and effectively packaged for distribution. Rather, this view mandates that information design would in effect be meta- design: design about design; design assisting humans in the making and unmaking of their own informations, their own sense. Some of these meta-designs may pertain to human activities amenable to fact transmission. But studies of information use suggest that relatively few human uses of information can be addressed solely if at all in factizing mode. The theory behind narrative #6 mandates that meta- design must deal with the entire complex range of what humans do when they make sense, when they construct their movements through an assumed to be ever-changing, sometimes chaotic, sometimes orderly, sometimes impenetrable time-space.

It is the position of this chapter, however, that the first step in the practice of information design in the sense presented here -- as meta-design -- involves a deliberate consciousness of what theories we will bring to bear on that design -- what theories of information, reality, people, and power. We will bring theories to bear either overtly and reflexively or as in the narratives of the past covertly and oppressively.

Narrative #6 mandates a particular kind of theory, one that focuses on information: as made and unmade in communication; as designed by all humans individually and collectively in struggle and mediation; as relevant both to making and unmaking both order and chaos; as theoretically incomplete and always open to potential contest; as relevant not only to the centered human but the decentered human; as relevant as well to human heart, body, and spirit in addition to human mind. Further, this kind of theory of information design would mandate as well that an information system be designed to assist human information designing and, in particular, the potentials for humans to share with each other the ways in which they have struggled individually and collectively to both create order out of chaos, and to create chaos out of order when that order restricts or constrains. This kind of theory of information design would mandate that we redefine the standards by which we judge something as informative: in essence, redefine what we mean by success and failure. Allowed into the system would not only be the factizings that permit regimentation as a sometimes useful way of making sense but the story-tellings that permit muddling throughs.

It could be said that the mandate of narrative #6 presents us with an awesome task for most of our understandings of human information use have been generated within narratives #1 to #4. On the other hand, it is possible to re-read our work in a new way looking for insights in the margins and between the lines. While it might be possible to say that humanness, as defined in narrative #6, has been systematically excluded from both research and design, it still is true that human beings with human compassions have done this work and they have developed a rich body of understandings and experimentings which can be brought to bear on our enterprise. In the same sense that information practitioners relay that their burn-outs come in good part from the fatiguing never-ending demand of serving human needs within inhuman systems, researchers have relegated some of their most important understandings of human beings to their discussions of study limitations focusing on the ways in which people did not fit expectations. We are not bereft therefore of hints.

In addition, there have been particularly arising from narratives #3 and #4, a body of studies which have begun to systematically explore this more human side of information. It is beyond the purpose of this chapter to review this work other than to note that it is richly informative. What follows below is the presentation of an approach called Sense- Making which has been explicitly developed following the guidelines derived from narrative #6.

AN EXEMPLAR THEORY, METHODOLOGY, AND PRACTICE: SENSE-MAKING

Twenty-two years in development, the Sense- Making approach is in actuality a set of assumptions, a theoretic perspective, a methodological approach, a set of research methods, and a practice. The approach was originally developed to assess how patients/ audiences/ users/ clients/ citizens make sense of their intersections with institutions, media, messages, and situations and to then apply the results in responsive communication/ information system design. Since its early development, the approach has been applied to a variety of contexts (political, everyday information seeking, health communication, organizational images, mass media audience reception, telecommunication use) at a variety of analytic levels (e.g. individual, group, organization, community, culture) in both quantitative studies with sample ns as large as 1000 and in qualitative studies with ns as small as 20. Work resting on the approach has been published and cited primarily in the various communication fields and the information and library science fields with some ancillary attention in other fields: primarily, social work, education, psychology. The most recent published empirical application is Shields, Dervin, Richter, and Soller 1993, an assessment of the communication needs and evaluations of a large sample of phone users. Among the most recent published theoretic pieces include Dervin 1994 (a detailed examination of assumptions underlying our treatments of the concept of information in the context of assumptions regarding democracy) and Dervin 1993 (a call for moving our study of human communication from noun theorizings to verb theorizings). (3)

The phenomena of Sense-Making's interest is sense- making, defined broadly in terms of the set of ontological and epistemological assumptions as well as the theory of the subject to which we are guided by narrative #6. Thus, Sense-Making accepts both epistemological and ontological incompleteness. Epistemological incompleteness is, of course, a common assumption of virtually every mode of theorizing in the social sciences today. It may be said that Sense-Making starts with the assumptions of phenomenology -- that the actor is inherently involved in her observations and it is from her perspectives and horizons that observations must be understood. What differs in this formulation is the explicit acceptance of ontological incompleteness. In doing this, Sense-Making posits that it is a stronger position methodologically to attend to ontological assumptions rather than bracket them, or set them aside, Sense-Making attends to ontology by assuming a reality that is in part patterned and in part chaotic. Sense-Making then brings this assumption together with epistemology by asserting that given an incomplete ontology and an incomplete epistemology, we arrive at an uncompromising species problematic -- the assumption that Sense-Making makes regarding persistent gaps in existence, between self at time 1 and time 2, between person 1 and person 2, between person and society, organization and organization, and so on.

From this, Sense-Making extracts two assumed mandates for the species: one is to make sense without complete instruction in a reality which is itself in flux and requires continued sense-making; the second to reach out to understand the sense made by others for the help it provides in the continuing species problematic. Sense-Making emphasizes the importance of the latter assumption in particular for it is not rooted (as most calls for understanding difference are) only in a relativistic epistemology, rather it is rooted in an assumption that humans must muddle through together, and the tools they have which assume an ordered reality are useful only to a portion of their sense-making mandates.

Setting this within the common polarities of social theorizing today, what Sense-Making explicitly does is enter the research situation in the "in between", between order and chaos, structure and individual, culture and person, self 1 and self 2, and so on. Sense-Making focuses on how humans make and unmake, develop, maintain, resist, destroy, and change order, structure, culture, organization, relationships, self.

The Sense-Making theoretic assumptions are implemented in method via a core methodological metaphor which pictures the human moving through time-space bridging gaps and moving on. Sense-Making thus mandates theorizing based on concepts relating to time, space, movement, and gap. Sense-Making also rests on a theory of the subject which is consonant with its ontological and epistemological assumptions: the human is conceptualized as centered and decentered; ordered and chaotic; cognitive, physical, spiritual, and emotional, differing potentially across time and across space. Sense-making assumes that the rigidities in information use implicitly hypothesized by demographic, personality, and many constructivist theories pertain only to a sub-set of human possibilities. As humans move across time-space both rigidities and flexibiities are possible. Sense-Making assumes that one of the reasons why our theories of information use and their potential applications to design have been so weak is that our theories have focused primarily on predicting patterns in rigidities, rather than patterns in flexibilities. This is an especial irony given that the inherent force behind most traditional conceptualizations of information use is that the user is open in some fundamental way to something beyond self.

One way in which S-M differs markedly from other approaches is that it explicitly privileges the ordinary person as necessarily a theorist involved in the development of ideas that provide guidance not only for understanding personal worlds but necessarily for understanding collective, historical, and social worlds as well. Sense-making is mandated to theorize the human in this way by narrative #6's acceptance of ontological incompleteness. If reality is incomplete then movement through it must be guided not only or merely by fact but by theory.. Further, in its attention to movement, Sense-Making mandates a focus on power by attending to forces that facilitate movement and forces that inhibit and constrain movement.

While Sense-Making relies heavily on concepts of time, space, movement, and gap, it must be emphasized that these are not set forth as if sense-making was merely a purposive, linear, problem-solving activity. These are posited as only a sub-set of human possibilities. The Sense-Making metaphor must be understood as a highly abstract framework. Likewise, too, while Sense-Making focuses on the human individual, it does not rest on an individualistic theory of human action. Rather, it assumes that structure, culture, community, organization are created, maintained, reified, challenged, changed, resisted, and destroyed in communication and can only be understood by focusing on the individual-in-context, including social context. Note, however, that this is not the same as saying the only way to look at the individual is through the lens of social context because this kind of theorizing implies the individual is entirely constrained or defined by that social context and, thus, admits no room for resisting, changing, inventing, or muddling.

In both the research context and the application context, Sense-Making is implemented in practice by the application of the Sense-Making triangle which encapsulates the Sense-Making metaphor in a picture of the human (individually or collectively) moving from a situation (time- space) across a gap by making a bridge, and then moving in on the other side of the bridge. The three points of this triangle include: situation, gap/bridge, and outcome.

In the research context, as one example, the Sense- Making metaphor is implemented in the interview in a number of alternative ways, ranging from in-depth interviews lasting from 1-2 hours and up to 6 hours to brief interviews lasting 20-30 minutes. The foundational interviewing approach, the one most aligned with Sense- Making's theory, is called the micro-moment time-line interview. In this approach the respondent is asked to describe one or more critical situations in detail first in terms of what happened first, second, third, and so on. Then for each time-line event respondents are asked to describe, in turn, situations (e.g. barriers, constraints, history, memory, experience), gaps (e.g. confusions, worries, questions, muddles), bridges (e.g. ideas, conclusions, feelings, opinions, hypotheses, hunches, stories, values, strategies, sources), and outcomes (e.g. helps, facilitations, hurts, hindrances, outcomes, effects, impacts). Since Sense- Making only provides a theory of the interview and not a recipe, actual implementation can take on myriad forms depending on the study purpose (e.g. needs assessment, evaluation, audience reception, etc.). Alternative approaches have the respondent detail the basic time-line and then choose the most important event, or question, or contact, and so on depending on study purpose. Some interviews enter through the situation, others through the gap, or bridge, or outcome.

It is important to note that Sense-Making conceptualizes the research situation as itself an applied communication situation involving attempts to understand how others have designed their senses of their worlds. In this situation, the researcher is involved in meta-design focusing on design. Likewise in application to what is commonly called practice, Sense-Making posits of theory of practice, a meta-design for design. In this way, Sense- Making sees no discontinuity between Sense-Making as a research approach and Sense-Making as an approach to the design of practice. The final sections of this chapter will present some illustrations of applications to practice and draw conclusions.

SOME APPLICATIONS

To date Sense-Making has been applied primarily in research contexts and thus most of the applications drawn to practice have been hypothetical. There have been, however, a number of actual practice applications and these combined with the hypothetical cases can be used here to show how the theoretic guidance offered by narrative #6 translates into a theory of information design and ultimately meta-design. The illustrations that follow are presented in no particular order other than there selection has been guided by a wish to present variety. (4)

While only a few of the examples below are highly technologized, it is a fundamental assumption of Sense- Making that the enormous flexibilities which the new technologies offer makes implementation of Sense-Making in practice potentially powerful. Most of the practice examples below could be implemented with technologies although in doing so we would have to change our definitions of what we mean by information coverage. In one sense, these applications demand greater coverage -- more viewpoints would be represented. In another sense, these applications demand less coverage because by mandate nothing would be closed down to certainty and wherever inputs called "information" are accessed they would be open to change and dialogue.

In implementing such systems fundamental questions would need to be answered, such as: How much diversity is sufficient to trigger user sense-making? How can we serve factizing needs without cutting-off challenges to factizing and without retreating to a conceptualization of information as a thing to be transferred? How do we handle vested interests? Can a profession serve the sense-making needs of users without being subject to the powerful influences of other professionals who have vested interests in particular kinds of sense? Given the enormity of these questions one could challenge that these illustrations are all exercises in impractical idealism. An alternative point of view suggests, however, that there is a large space in society for professional facilitators of sense-making. Yet another point of view suggests that the myriad challenges we see globally to nation states, organizational systems, and experts are in part of manifestation of enormous failures on the part of the former to be useful informationally to people.

SENSE-MAKING THE REFERENCE INTERVIEW. The most extensive application of Sense- Making to date has been in the interview at the library reference desk. Training in the use of the Sense-Making approach to the reference interview has been extensively used in several locales with some professionals reporting that they have changed their practice entirely to this approach and others reporting that they combine the approach with others. It is fair to estimate that some 500 individuals have been so trained. Essentially this approach to the reference interview focuses on using Sense-Making as a dialogic interface between librarian and patron so that the librarian can better serve the information needs of the patron. The librarian focuses on developing a picture of the user's sense- making triangle by asking such questions as: What led you to ask this question? How do you hope to be helped? If you could get the best possible answer, what would it be like?

JOURNAL AUTHORS AS SENSE-MAKERS. In a small test application, a set of 10 journal articles were abstracted for students in two classes. In one class, traditional abstracts and keywords were presented. In the second class added to these traditional abstracts were Sense- Making statements elicited from the authors answering such questions as: What was it that you hoped to accomplish with this article? What led you to write it? How did writing it help you? How do you think it will help others? What was your major struggle with the article? What remains unresolved? Students were asked to rank order the articles in terms of potential usefulness. They were then given the articles for use in term papers. Three months later they were asked to rank order the articles in terms of actual usefulness. The actual and potential usefulness ratings of the class which received the Sense-Making abstracts were significantly closer than those in the traditional abstract class. The implication is that mandating authors to treat their writings using guidance from Sense-Making provides more potential bridges of connection for readers.

SACRIFICING THE COHERENT JOURNALISM NARRATIVE. In this small scale test application, journalism students were taught to sacrifice the coherent narrative which is foundation stone of journalistic practice and instead surround their phenomena of interest in the kind of circling of reality mandated by Sense-Making. The students were taught to ask questions of themselves such as: What leads me to care about this? Who else cares? What leads them to care? What different groups of people care? Within groups, what contests might there be? What would be alternative views of the reasons for the contests? Is there consensus across groups/people on any points? What explains this? The student journalists were also taught to select for observation and interview 5-6 maximally different sites with the selection taking into account issues of power and difference, and to within sites to seek out both contest and consensus, those with power and those without. When writing up the results of their efforts, the journalists were taught to display the results spatially rather than narratively. In assessing the results, a group of student readers talked with the student journalists and the discussion focused on such questions as: Given that the journalist can not present all viewpoints, what is sufficient difference to trigger the reader's own sense-making processes? How could technologies be used to implement this kind of journalism?

TRANSFORMING A PROFESSIONAL STEREOTYPE. Interested in the level of activity around it's video desk a public library asked users to explain how the videos they watched helped them. The results transformed how the librarians thought of their video collections for users reported a range of life-enhancing and surviving outcomes that ran counter to stereotypes of video as entertainment. As a result, the library both increased its video budget and developed programmatic connections between the video collection and literacy training.

HOW BOOKS HELP. At another library a small test was run of a bulletin board on which readers were invited to post their answers to these questions: How did the book you are returning today help you? What leads you to say this? These answers were posted on a bulletin board. Librarians observed users standing for long periods reading responses. They also observed an increase in demand for some books with ordinarily low circulations.

STUDENT SENSE-MAKING. A trial Sense- Making system was developed for a class. First, students who had taken the class in the past were interviewed using Sense-Making and ask to describe their sense-making relating to writing their class paper. An analysis was done of the situations, gaps, bridges, and helps and these were structured into an interactive computer program so that new students could plot their own paths through the input on an as needed basis. A large number of paths were possible. Students could enter via situations, gaps, bridges, helps. Thus, for example, a student might start by choosing a situation such as "I hate this class" or a bridge "What's the best resource on this topic?" or a gap "How can I choose a topic when I'm so confused" or an outcome "What's the easiest way to do this?" Once through the gate of each entry additional gates were offered, again developed inductively based on the actual sense-making needs of those who had gone through the experience in the past. Students could, for example, ask a question and then select the kind of answer they would like -- for example, what a librarian said, what the teacher said, what a good student said, a selection of what different students said Student users could also add their comments if they found their own sense- making needs not sufficiently represented.

INFORMATION PRESENTATION AT A BLOOD DONATING CENTER. The information needs and uses of donors at a blood center arise for donors within the context of a sequenced movement through the donating process -- intake, testing, preparation, donating, recovering. Most attempts to inform donors occur before intake but a Sense- Making study showed that there were reasonably demarked sequences of sense-making and that most information needs could be addressed more fully and more usefully by providing answers to questions more likely to be raised at particular points in the process. Results also suggested that there were a number of information needs which were not easily articulated publicly but could be handled with a interactive and path flexible sense-making system controlled by donor. Further, as is generally mandated by Sense- Making, questions were rarely supplied with only one answer unless no contests or differences in perspective were unearthed in the background research.

INFORMATION SHEETS FOR DOCTORS. In a small scale application in a cancer clinic, information sheets were prepared for patients which attended to the major questions patients asked as unearthed in Sense-Making interviews. Each sheet focused on one question. Since interviews with patients showed patients were very concerned about conflicts in information, major emphasis was placed on the conflicts. The typical question was followed by answers from 3-4 doctors, 1-2 nurses, and several patients. The answers were then followed with a circling of the conflicts -- each source was asked what accounted for the differences in the answer and these replies became part of the information sheet as well.

SURVEILLING AN ORGANIZATION. In an organizational context, a leader used Sense-Making to begin every staff meeting by having each staff member talk briefly in answer to these questions: What successes did you have briefly last week? What successes did we collectively have last week? What made these successes possible? What barriers or struggles did you face last week? What barriers or struggles did we collectively face last week? What do you see as leading to these barriers/struggles? What do you think would help? The leader reported that while participants resisted the process at first over time it become a meeting highlight. In addition, the leader reported that consensus- building became much easier and that over-time staff become more tolerant of each other and more willing to help each other. Further, their critical needs for information collecting became more clearly apparent and their efforts less wasteful.

CONSTRUCTING A RESEARCH COMMUNITY. Much the same approach was used in a research community where each participant presented work for group discussion. Presentations were kept brief -- no more than 30 minutes -- and no interruptions were allowed. At the end of the presentation, each listener was asked to speak for 3-4 minutes in answer to these questions: What was helpful to you about this presentation? How did it help? What connections do you see between your work and this presentation? What leads you to say that? What confused you about this presentation? What would have helped you handle that confusion? What would you have like to see in this presentation that was not there? How would that have helped you? After this round, discussion opened up to the more usual procedures. Evaluation of the process by leader and participants suggested that the process helped enter more easily into constructive dialogue and find ways to connect with and assist each others work.

SELF SENSE-MAKING. In this application of Sense-Making persons interview themselves using the detailed micro-moment time-line interview to examine a situation of struggle or confusion or threat. Following the usual approaches to the interview, the self-interviewer details what happened in the situation and then for each time-line step what conclusions or ideas or thoughts they came to, what emotions or feelings they felt, and what confusions or worries they faced. Each conclusion, idea, thought, emotion, feeling, confusion, worry is then probed: what lead to it? how does it connect to your life? did it help or facilitate? did it hurt or hinder? how? what constraints or barriers or forces are at play? what explains these? These self-interviews have been conducted with more than 1000 persons over some 20 years and universally the self- interviewers report increases in understanding not only of self but of others and conditions and events. Further, the self-interviews report increases in understanding how and what information from others could be helpful.

CONCLUSIONS

What has been proposed in this chapter is first the application of an assumption that information is designed, covertly or overtly, and that in the context of this assumption our most important mandate as we face a practice of information design is to make the theories by which we practice explicit and reflexive. Second, this chapter has traced a brief history of theories of information design structured in an argument suggesting that we must radically change our theory if we are to pursue a practice that is maximally helpful to the human condition. Third, this chapter has presented an exemplar approach called Sense- Making whose theory and methodology mandates a practice which looks at information design as involving a dialogic circling of reality, a reality that can be reached for but never touched, described in gossamer but never sculpted. This practice would focus on meta-design: design about design, and explicitly acknowledge that its work pertains not to merely transferring information from here to there, but to assisting the species in its own information design.

If we are to pursue this challenge we will find ourselves having to examine our uses of some terms traditionally held fundamental to information processes: fact, knowledge, data, and even the very concept information itself. If indeed we are at the moment of a rupture of the episteme with order on one side, chaos on the other, this analysis suggests that our traditional conceptions of information stand on the order side. Because of this, the mandate to focus on sense-making as the foundation of information design may seem not only radical, but quite mad. Standing on the chaos side of the rupture, the mandate seems perhaps frightening. But what is proposed here is a reconceptualization of the rupture that chooses both order and chaos and the ways in which humans individually and collectively design the sense that permits them to move from one to the other. Some may see the role of information design being diminished by this move. Alternatively, it is possible to see it's role enriched to a role of some consequence to the species.

FOOTNOTES

1. Since the mandate for this volume is to write for a diverse audience, this chapter presents its arguments in as accessible language as possible without arduous tracing of the roots of ideas and detailed footnotes. In addition citations are reduced to the bare essentials and to only the most recent work by scholars to whom a debt is owed. Readers who wish more detailed and extensive presentations albeit developed for different purposes are directed to Dervin 1994, 1993, 1992, and 1991. The author acknowledges the debt owed to the writings in particular of: Bruner, Dewey, Freire, Giddens, Habermas, and Krippendorff, and Mouffe. A particular debt is owed to Richard F. Carter whose work has informed the author's own more than any other.
2. In this chapter, the terms information, knowledge, knowing, data, truth are used purposely without any attempt to distinguish precisely between. The intent is to pick up on the way in which we terms are used without definition in everyday discourse, even everyday scholarship. It is a major point of this article that most of the conceptual edifices constructed to distinguish between these terms in fact posit truth, defined as statements isomorphic to reality, as the criterion for knowledge and information.
3. In this presentation, Sense-Making the approach is distinguished from sense-making the phenomena by the use of the two capital letters.
4. More complete descriptions of most of these examples can be found in Dervin 1992, Dervin 1989, and Dervin and Dewdney 1986. More information can also be obtained from the author.

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